Washington Post Article

International Aid Worker Marguerite 'Mara' Galaty, 38
Source: Washington Post
By Patricia Sullivan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 9, 2007; B06

Marguerite Rose "Mara" Galaty, 38, an effervescent Agency for International Development officer who worked on development projects around the world, died of metastatic melanoma Nov. 3 at her parents' home in Washington. She lived in Amman, Jordan.

Ms. Galaty built coalitions between nongovernmental organizations, the Jordanian government, the European Union and colleagues in the U.S. government, developing more than $30 million in programs to directly assist local communities. She most recently created a series of programs to support Jordan's upcoming municipal elections.

Her life was devoted to international matters, starting with her birth overseas, through a high school semester abroad and volunteer work in college, to her career with nongovernmental organizations and U.S. AID. Proficient in eight languages -- German, Spanish, French, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian, Turkish and Dutch -- and a student of Arabic, she was nicknamed by her graduate school classmates as "Poly-galaty."

She was born in Heidelberg, West Germany, and grew up in Green Bay, Wis., and the Washington area, graduating from Churchill High School in Potomac, where she was a cheerleader and the first female manager of the boys' football team.
She spent a high school semester in Kassel, Germany, and a college semester in Bonn, Germany. While a student at the University of Wisconsin, she raised funds and organized students to fly to Merida, Mexico, to help small villages recovering from Hurricane Hugo.

After graduation, she served in the Peace Corps, part of its first group in Bulgaria, and then taught English in Istanbul. She received a master's degree in 1995 from Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies.
Ms. Galaty won a prestigious Bosch Fellowship in 1996 and worked as an associate of the Aspen Institute on disputes in the Balkans.

While in that position, she handpicked young leaders from different constituencies in the Balkans, then persuaded them with charm and steely diplomatic skills to form a working group that developed advice on how to keep the peace. The members are now in positions of authority across Europe, and their network proved helpful when war revisited Kosovo in the late 1990s.

By 2000, Ms. Galaty returned to grass-roots work in Portland, Ore. She led civil-society development programs at Mercy Corps, an international humanitarian organization. During her four years there, she developed projects around the world, including a land conflict group in Guatemala, an effort that blossomed into a multimillion-dollar program that has resolved almost 150 land conflicts and attracted funding from the U.S. government and the European Union.

She joined AID in 2004 and was based in Jordan until she became ill in August. She had survived breast cancer six years ago but cancer returned, this time to her brain. Such was the affection that her friends and colleagues felt toward her that the blog detailing her treatment attracted thousands of visitors and hundreds of comments from around the world.

Survivors include her companion, David Mees of Amman; her father and stepmother, David and Debra Galaty of Portland, Ore.; her mother and stepfather, Carol Galaty and Gil Hill of Washington; her grandfather, former U.S. ambassador David Popper of Washington; three sisters; and two brothers.