Hi! My name is Mary Beth Genet, so my initials are MBG. 'Beth' is short for 'Elizabeth', my mother's name. 'Genet' is pronounced: /juh-NAY/. I was born in California in 1954. Both my parents lived to be very old. My father died when he was 97 years old, and my mother when she was almost 95. They had 3 sons, and then 11 years after the youngest son was born, surprise! They had a daughter, me!
My oldest brother was a journalist. He was an editor for the magazine Christianity Today, getting news about churches and Christians from all over the world. He helped publish Christian literature in Lebanon for many years. Now he is retired and lives near Chicago. He plays traditional Christian music, like hymns, on the piano. He has three children and 9 grandchildren.
My middle brother, Russell, is a scientist and a professor. He loves to teach about astronomy (the study of the stars), and to help students publish papers about observing variable stars (stars that change their brightness in a cycle). He also loves building unique telescopes, and sold his business of building automatic telescopes to his oldest son. He plays classical music on his organ. He lives in central California. He has 5 children and 8 or 9 grandchildren. (I have a hard time keeping track of them all.)
My youngest brother is an artist and a truck driver. He loves to paint pictures, play jazz music on his electric piano, and travel. He lives near Oklahoma City, has 2 children, and 5 or 6 grandchildren.
The one thing all 4 of us children have in common is that we all enjoy photography, and are pretty good at taking pictures.
By the time I was 4 years old, my father and all 3 of my brothers were gone from home, so most of my childhood I lived with just my mother. We lived in a small town in southern California. My mother had to work, so I started going to a preschool when I was 2 1/2 years old, and went to a private Christian elementary school.
When I was 12 years old, I went to San Francisco to visit my youngest brother and his new wife. When I came home, our house was up for sale! After it sold, we moved to Lima, New York, and then Kenya, East Africa! We even lived for a short time in a mud house with a tin roof, and had a monkey for a pet. One time safari ants ate our chickens, another time a leapard purred under my mother's window at night, and once I got chased by a mother hippo. It was often exciting and interesting, but the difficult part of living in Africa was having to go to school far away - too far to live at home. For all 4 years of high school, I had to live at the Rift Valley Academy for 3 months at a time, then 1 month at home. It took a whole day driving on very bad roads to get to school or to get home. My favorite subjects were foreign languages (Latin, French and Swahili), and social sciences. My least favorite subject was any boring math, like accounting.
After growing up in both California and Africa, I am what they call a 'Third Culture Kid', because I do not completely fit in with either Americans, or Africans, but fit in more with others who have grown up in more than one culture. As an adult, I went back to Kenya to teach a few American missionary children in western Kenya so they did not have to go to bording school. Much later in life, I went to Deagu, South Korea for 8 years, to teach in the English Language and Literature Department at Keimyung University. I was so surprised to find that the culture was this delightful combination of a few Western ways of thinking, but more like the Eastern ways of thinking I had become comfortable with in East Africa.
After 8 years in Korea, I returned to Seattle in 2003. Since then I have been involved with international students in different ways: a house manager of a house full of international students near the UW, an assistant for a homestay agency, the Homestay Coordinator for Edmonds Community College, tutoring students in English, and teaching English in short term programs. As you can see, I really do like international students!
I also like the ocean, mountains, chatting with friends, reading, traveling, hiking, and playing the piano (Contemporary Christian Music (CCM), other worship music and classical music). I hope to learn how to paint pictures.
Sorry this introduction is so long. But if you made it to the end, I hope you enjoyed reading it all!
