Sandra Roelofs
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sandra Saakashvili-Roelofs (born December 23, 1968) is the Dutch first lady of Georgia, the wife of President Mikheil Saakashvili.
She was born Sandra Roelofs in Terneuzen, the Netherlands. She graduated from the Institute of Foreign Languages in Brussels and the International Institute of Human Rights in Strasbourg. She met Mikheil Saakashvili in 1993 while attending a course on human rights in Strasbourg and later that year moved to New York where she worked at Columbia University and a Dutch law firm. In 1996 the couple returned to Georgia, where Roelofs worked for the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Consulate of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Tbilisi.
In 1998 she founded the SOCO charitable foundation, which organizes humanitarian projects sponsored by Dutch companies and individuals.
From 1999 to 2003, Sandra Roelofs was a visiting lecturer at Tbilisi State University, where she also worked on her doctoral thesis on linguistic aspects of the French in Belgium. Aside from her native Dutch, Sandra Roelofs speaks French, English, German, Russian and fluent Georgian.
Roelofs and Saakashvili have two sons, Edward and Nikoloz.
She is an author of an autobiographic book The Story of an Idealist (2005).
[edit] References
- Official biography
- Caspian Business News article on Mrs. Saakashvili-Roelofs
