security

The other night, I thought I heard something outside, and couldn't sleep for an hour or so because I was so scared. But I was reassured by how protected we are (well, for the most part).

First of all, we have guards (students at the college who are trying to earn some money for school tuition) who walk around the campus at night. Well sometimes they fall asleep, but they are still out there, which comforts me.

Also, we have a wall and gates around our campus.

Lastly, we have bars on our house. We live in one of the first houses built on campus, so our bars are a little different than the newer houses. Our main rooms (the living room, dining room, and kitchen) have windows without bars. We do have bars we put across the doors, though. Here is a picture of one of the windows. The side windows do have bars, but the center window is completely bar-less, which does not protect us against break-ins!

Ergo the gate! This gate is in the doorway from the living room to the hallway (with the bedrooms coming off of it). If you lock it, then no one can get back into the bedrooms.

Here is a view from the closed gate into the living room.

The windows in the back all have bars on them.

In case of a fire or another emergency, one of the back window bars can be unlocked and swung out. Then you have to slide the glass slats out, break the screen, and climb out.

These precautions make us feel pretty safe. The upper campus has had some break-in issues this past year, but the lower campus (where we are) has actually been fine. But, in the late 80's and 90's, the lower end of campus had a lot of break-ins.

One fun little story: When we went on spring holiday, we locked the gate to the hallway after putting some valuables in our bedroom. Bech put the gate lock key on his keychain. When we got back, he forgot to take it off of the keychain and hang it inside the hallway. Some nights we don't lock the hall gate, and we didn't that night. But then Bech heard something outside, so he got up to lock the gate (forgetting that the key was on his keychain in the kitchen).

The next morning, when the alarm went off, Bech realized that he had locked us in the back of the house. I was not very nice to him about this all (don't worry, I apologized to him later). Bech unlocked the emergency bars, pulled out the slats, and climbed out the window. He then broke the screen on one of the living room windows, and pushed off the door bar, successfully breaking into our house. So we weren't locked into our back rooms for that long. But it still wasn't a fun feeling at 5:30 in the morning!