An Affordable Sitter in a Foreign Land

Finding a sitter while traveling is difficult enough, but finding an affordable one? It seems nearly impossible. And even if it were easy, frugal travelers might ask themselves, wouldn't stinting on payment pretty much guarantee that the sitter would be a serial killer?

Please. Finding a safe sitter you can afford in a strange land is eminently doable, if you think creatively. (And besides, serial killers seek you out - they don't wait for you to come to them. Right?)

The first place to start is where you might start at home: local colleges and universities. Maybe this is just because I grew up in college towns, but when I was little there always seemed to be a limitless number of students who had a lot of free time and a great need for extra cash. These students are a prime resource, both because they're energetic and, since they're often ambitious and outgoing, eager to meet the kind of clever, interesting travelers who would seek out their services.

How do you contact them? Through the university itself is best, either by going to a department of student affairs, the campus newspaper, a bulletin board on the school's Web site or even the financial aid office, which might know students most interested in earning a little extra income.

This approach gets more complicated, however, when your trip is going to take you and your brood outside the United States. After all, college students as economical child-minders is very much an American cultural norm. It might not make sense in Shanghai, say, or in the Turkish college town of Edirne.

The good thing, though, is that American college students are all over the world, courtesy of increasingly popular study-abroad programs. To find and contact such programs, go to StudyAbroad.com, which has a directory of them in dozens of countries, from Albania to Zimbabwe.