Dr. Marta Ann Beaubien, MD

By the time Marta Beaubien was 14-years-old, she was very well traveled. Her father is an Adventist minister and his work took the family to a variety of far-flung places.

She was born in California in the Bay area, but when she was a year old her father accepted the position as pastor to a church in Puna, Peru, near Lake Titicaca, where they stayed for a year. For the next five years they lived in Lima where her father taught at Peruvian Union College.

After Peru they lived in Loma Linda, Calif., for about a year, then moved to British Columbia in Canada; first to Victoria for four years and then to nearby Vancouver for another three years.

She attended high school in Washington at an Adventist boarding academy in Spangle, "in the wheat fields near Spokane.t After high school she stayed in Washington to attend Walla Walla College.

sI was a religion major at Walla Walla. I knew I was going into pre-med, but you don’t actually have to have a science major. I figured I’d …do something a little different. I enjoy languages and I took Hebrew and other things.

sI said, ?I’m going to be in school a while so I may as well enjoy it.’ I did a science minor so I could get my science requirements out of the way and then I did aviation"I almost got a minor in that. I learned how to fly and had a good time doing it.t

She met her husband, Tobin, an emergency-room nurse, in college. He was in her chemistry class, but they really got to know one another while taking flying lessons"both are avid pilots.

She went to medical school at the University of Washington and participated in the sWWAMIt program, designed for first-year medical students from Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, and Idaho who are interested in rural medicine. WWAMI students from Washington and Idaho attend classes at Washington State University and she joined about 30 other students at WSU for her first year of medicine.

Her second year she attended classes at the University of Washington in Seattle, but sfor your third and fourth years when you are doing rotations you can travel to some of the other states. My third year we went to Ketchikan, Alaska for Family Practice and that was a lot of fun.t In 1996 she received her medical degree from the University of Washington School of Medicine.

She did her residency in pediatrics at the University of California San Francisco-Fresno. During her last year she was Chief Resident. She also renewed her acquaintanceship with Spanish. sI had forgotten most of it, but when I did my residency in Fresno I picked it up again. Down there you either speak Spanish or you wait around a lot for interpreters.

sHere [at the Moses Lake Clinic] I probably spend close to half my day speaking Spanish. I have a lot of Spanish-speaking patients.t

Pediatrics in Moses Lake is flourishing. sWe’re getting a lot of kids from this area, which is good. We work at the hospital some, which gives me the opportunity to treat some of the sicker kids, which is gratifying.

sSo we take care of the well kids, but we also have really sick kids. In a big town they would just see a specialist. We take care of them here and if necessary we arrange for their care in Spokane and other places. It’s something like the Internal Medicine of Pediatrics and it keeps life very interesting.t

The Beaubiens like the rural life. sWe have eight acres. We built a house last year and put in a sprinkler system for our two acres of lawn.

sAt our old place we had 17 acres and we did hay. My husband grew tired of that so we got out of the hay business. This year hay is really expensive. We, of course, got out of it at just the right time."

The Beaubians have two children, a 5-year-old daughter and a 2-year-old son. sWe have horses and my daughter has a pony and she loves it,t she said. sWith the kids being so young we don’t travel as much as we used to. We hike a lot and we camp. My grandparents live in California and we go down there fairly often and go to the beach.t

This year they also went to the Bahamas. sWe went to th