Michael Mertaugh

I graduated from Kalamazoo College in 1968, and the same year married a college classmate, went to work in Washington DC, and got drafted into the Army.  I finished a PhD in economics at the University of Michigan in 1975, went to Seattle and worked for four years at the Battelle Institute and climbed many of the peaks in the Cascades.  We drove across the country with three small children in 1979 to take up a job in New York with the Population Council (working mostly on population and development issues in Africa), then moved to Washington DC in 1981 to accept a job at the World Bank, where I have been ever since.  Over the past 22 years, I have worked on development projects in Morocco, China, Indonesia, Jordan, Turkey, Bosnia, Serbia, and many other countries.  These days, most of my work is in Central Asia – in Kyrgyzstan, where I am developing a project to improve rural schools throughout the country.  I’m also developing a project to provide educational opportunities for the Roma (gypsies) of Central and Eastern Europe. 

My passions are ballet, ice dance, mountain climbing, classical guitar, bluegrass, and woodworking.  I’m looking forward to retirement so I can go back to school – including refreshing the Latin I learned with Mrs. Vincent, taking up ancient Greek, ancient history, and architecture – and return to archeological explorations in the Aegean that we started during a three-year stint in Turkey a few years back.  I’m also looking forward to continuing to act as an extra in ballet performances at the Kennedy Center.  And also looking forward to spending more time with my new granddaughter in Vermont.