Rod Merta:  

Having grown up in Menlo Park, I attended James Flood Elementary School (1953-1960), Menlo Oaks Junior High School (1960-1962), and my freshman year at Menlo Atherton High School (1962-1963), before moving to Redwood City and transferring to San Carlos High School in 1963. After high school, I completed the College of San Mateo and San Francisco State before entering the Peace Corps and serving (1971-1974) in the Western Pacific (Yap and Palau, Micronesia) teaching English and working in community development. While in Micronesia, I met and married Aggie, my soul mate of 50 years. Wanderlust continued its hold on us, in particular me, as Aggie and I proceeded to live and work in San Mateo County (1974-1976), Hopi Tribe in northern Arizona (1976-1978), Guam (1978-1980), Safford, Arizona (1980-1984), Lincoln, Nebraska (1984-1988), and Tucson (1988-1989) before making Las Cruces, New Mexico our home. I obtained my MA in counseling at the University of Guam and my Ph.D. In counseling psychology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, while Aggie obtained her BA in fine arts from UN-L and her MA in special education at New Mexico State University. I taught graduate students in counseling, school psychology, and counseling psychology at New Mexico State University (1989-2009) while operating a private practice-Rio Grande Psychological Services and serving as a school psychologist in the public schools. In the meantime, Aggie taught special education at the middle school level for 17 years and then taught art for her last 6 1/2 years. More recently, I served as a clinical psychologist at the Veterans Affairs Center in El Paso (2012-2015) before returning to the schools in January of 201...Expand for more