That Year, We Lived in the Married Students’ Dorms

From the Front Page Sections, translated…

Recalled that when I first got my doctoral program okay, I’d gotten the note of applying for a dormitory, it’d stated how there is the dorm for married couples, that the families with children can apply for a two-bedroom apartment, and those without the children can file for the applications of a single-room dorm. Or maybe, it’s because of how Americans are married young, these apartments weren’t just for the students, but opened to married couples who are in college as well. And because the makeup of these two families are different, the latter would usually get an ordinary apartment, but the former, it’d considered the needs of the children into the designs. On top of that, as the women got pregnant while living in the dorms, they can immediately apply for a two-bedroom apartment, and usually, the approvals would come, before the child was born.

Our apartment sections is shaped with an opening at the bottom, it has over thirty separate housing complexes, the empty lot in the middle has the sandboxes, the slides and the swings for the children to play in, the sidewalk, became a place where the kids would ride on their Big Wheel tricycles and chased one another around. There are a lot of picnic areas by the front of the patches of the apartment, and not only is it used for the gatherings with the neighbors, it’d also given the parents a close place to watch over their young as they played there.

not my photograph…

The two-bedroom apartment has the ducts for the washing machine and dryers, suited well, for the families with the infants that needed to change a lot, the standardized heating systems made sure that the young children won’t be freezing. The school would regularly send the experts in to see if the fire extinguishers in by the floors are working, as well as the exterminations of bugs too, to make sure that the living environment is clean.

Every summer, we could also, spend a few bucks, and rent a patch from the schools to plant our own vegetables. After the school was done, tilling the land, we’d enclaved our own small vegetable garden, and start spreading the seeds down, and started the hard work of being a farmer. We’d planted the tomatoes, the garden greens, zucchinis, corns, chili peppers, soy beans, etc., etc., etc., and, if we don’t work hard in our vegetable gardens, they would be overcome with weeds and bugs, and, we wouldn’t have a good harvest. And, in between the times in our studies, and working on our dissertations, planting these vegetables can not just save us on the groceries, it’d also had the effect of getting our lives into order. Most of the times, the families who’d come to help their loved ones recover after birth, they were from the older generations of agricultural workers, and, they’d become, the ones we’d consulted on the plants.

what the dormitories looked like…

It takes a ton of stamina, to finish a doctoral degree, but, for the spouses who weren’t the students, to accompany, it would be, very trying, but because there’s the married dorms, and, in my section, there were, over a dozen families from Taiwan, it’d allowed them to have people to chat with, and at the same time, they could share their cooking and childrearing tips too, and, the moms get to have a breath of fresh air, in the busyness of every day living, and the kids have friends that they can play with.

And so, you do see that there are, a ton of benefits, for the married couple dorms on the university campuses, right? As the families are starting to form, the needs of the individuals are altered, and, the schools must change the formations of how it’s set up, to fit the needs, the requirements of the students who are studying there.