GEORGIA’S FIRST LADY ARRIVES IN ARMENIA FOR WORKING VISIT

YEREVAN, JANUARY 16, ARMENPRESS; Georgia’s First Lady, Sandra Roulofs, is arriving today on a working visit in Yerevan. She will spend here three days discussing largely medical, social and cultural issues.
She is scheduled to meet with Armenia’s First Lady, Mrs. Bella Kocharian and also with health and culture ministers. The embassy of Georgia in Yerevan will hold a reception in her honor.
This will be Mrs. Sandra Roulofs second visist to Armenia. She was here in 2004 December.
Sandra Saakashvili-Roelofs was born December 23, 1968. She is the Dutch First Lady of Georgia, the wife of President Mikhail Saakashvili. She graduated from the Institute of Foreign Languages in Brussels and the International Institute of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
She met Mikhail 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.