The Training School Day 1 – Close to New York City
At around six in the morning, I was woken up by the pitiful squeaking and creaking of the bed frame as the girl above me tried unsuccessfully to get dressed as inconspicuously as possible. But my initial displeasure quickly evaporated thanks to the promising realization that I could actually have the bathroom to myself. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who had had this thought, however, because the girls were already stepping on each other’s feet in the corridor as they tried to form a queue. My fears about the state of the bathroom worsened every time the door was opened and a torrent of water poured onto the shoes of the bystanders. I really hoped that this was from the showers and not the toilets.
When it was finally my turn and I entered the stuffy, crowded room, this mystery had to remain unsolved. Without exception, everything was under water, and it was impossible to tell where it was coming from. Privacy turned out to be a vain hope in the Wild West of hygiene ventures. The fact that the showers were only separated from each other by a wafer-thin curtain was perhaps bearable, but when it came to the toilets at the latest, one could have wished that the privacy screen had been more than just a hint of goodwill. Thanks to sufficiently large gaps and crevices, anyone passing by had the opportunity to observe you at length.
Some girls seemed to have already completely surrendered to their fate and simply ran through the area unclothed. As the number of people who had seen me naked was limited to two – my parents when I was a toddler – I compulsively clutched my towel to me and tried to get the horror over with as quickly as possible. Actually, showering was overrated anyway. “Well sprayed is half showered”, I tried to reassure myself as I vigorously shook my bottle of deodorant.
My nerves were already thinner than the shower curtains as I made my way to the dining room with Caro. It was in a different part of the building, we had actually heard that much of the lecture yesterday. There we finally met up with Amelie, who was staying somewhere else in the building. She only acknowledged our stories about the washroom, which would haunt our dreams for a long time to come, with a tired smile. She had to share her room with five other girls and her bed didn’t really deserve the name, as it was little more than a rickety iron frame with a thin foam mat. She could still feel every single screw. And her bathroom wasn’t that crowded, but the water had a brownish color and smelled unpleasant. Anyone who had showered in it must have had the willpower to make us shiver with awe.
We grabbed a few bagels with cream cheese from the buffet and passed the time watching the other girls from different countries while we ate. After spotting the infamous Swedish girls, all of whom were indeed tall, slim, blue-eyed, and blessed with flowing blonde hair, a discussion broke out between us about how strong a marriage had to be to survive such an addition to the family unscathed. But maybe it was just a test on the part of the host mother.
At a quarter past eight, the lessons began to prepare us for the nanny year. Unfortunately, the division into several classes and the equipment in the classrooms reminded me very much of my school days, which I thought I had finally escaped. Our teacher immediately lost all my sympathy points when her very first action was to sit me away from Amelie and Caro. She said there were too many Germans at the table and that we were here to improve our English. Not that there would have been enough time for that in a year’s time.
We actually started with the traditional round of introductions, the point of which was not entirely clear to me, as we were only spending a weekend at the school and would never see most of the other girls again. I got through the whole thing quickly and was the second person to repeat my name and hobbies after the only boy in the group. Shortly afterwards, one girl burst into tears during her introduction because she was already so homesick. It took quite a while for her to calm down again, and she looked at us, visibly, ashamed. After that, the atmosphere was a little sombre.
There was a short break at ten, during which we used to sign up for the New York trip offered by the school and pay for it right away. Provided you weren’t one of the lucky ones, like Amelie, whose host family sponsored it for her. This gave her more time to talk to her host mum on the phone. Overjoyed, she then told us how many great things they had already planned together.
The lessons, which, it should be mentioned here again, were intended to prepare us for the difficulties of nanny life and to give us good advice, turned out to be a collection of bizarre moments. The fact that you should wash your hands after using the toilet was explained to us in the first lesson. At first, I thought it was a joke and that someone would enter the room laughing and start the real lesson. Instead, we were shown a movie in which a visibly nervous woman, her shrill voice competing for attention with her 90s clothes, was supposed to warn us about sources of danger for small children. After all, children shouldn’t play with chainsaws or drink cleaning products. Unfortunately, this meant I had to remove this from my activity plan.
However, the school placed absolute priority on the principle: “Never shake a baby”. Allegedly, some nannies had already killed their host children more or less unintentionally by shaking them. To make sure we didn’t do anything like that, posters on the walls everywhere illustrated the dangers of shaking for small children and, of course, there was also a movie about it, which this time not only tested our nerves but also our common sense.
The subject remained at this level. Next, we were asked to make posters about the worst childhood illnesses. Well, that made sense somewhere, but was it really necessary to make us fill out a dozen pages in a workbook weighing an estimated three kilograms? Apparently so.
At least the last item on the program had nothing to do with babies being shaken to death or terrible rashes. We were allowed to spend the rest of the afternoon doing arts & crafts, which we were happy to do. At least as long as we didn’t know that we would be accompanied by typical American children’s TV shows. I was pretty sure I saw a chainsaw in bloody action at one point.
Dinner time at last. We had corn on the cob and burgers and the day ended with the infamous “Sing Along”. I had heard a few stories about it, and even YouTube had videos that depicted the general agony all too vividly. The nannies were divided into nationalities and then had to sing and dance on stage in front of everyone.
To make matters worse, temperatures in the hall were close to freezing, thanks to the extremely hard-working air conditioning system. Snow suddenly drizzling from the ceiling would not have surprised me at this point. So groups of girls, some of them shivering, huddled together on stage and bravely tried to show off their more or less distinctive singing and dancing skills. To my immense relief, there were so many Germans that even after splitting into three groups, I found myself among 38 other girls on stage. Enough to blend in with the masses.
A few others were not so lucky and only ended up on stage in twos or threes. And to sing something unprepared in front of the critical eyes of more than 300 people takes a lot of courage in my opinion. To be precise, we were 261 girls and 8 boys, the largest nanny group to date, as one teacher proudly announced to us at the beginning. All in all, the evening was surprisingly fun and definitely a unique experience.
A few people, including myself, tried to get in touch with their host parents or family back home using the computers provided. An endeavor that found a strong opponent in the slow internet connection. It took about eight minutes to load a single page. Honestly, after a while, we started to time our efforts. Most of us gave up in despair at some point, went for a cigarette to relieve the stress, or slumped down on the uncomfortable iron beds with still aching limbs from the night before.