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Campus News
     
Your faculty and staff news since 1965
Special Spotlight Issue:  April 22, 2002

Greek Spirit, American Opportunity
Hohlfelder makes the most of her career at Continuing Ed

By Mary Conrad

Fofi Ralli HodlfelderThere’s something of an Olympic athlete in Fofi Ralli Hohlfelder. No, there’s no accounting category in the upcoming Athens event, nor are there training facilities at Continuing Ed. But Fofi approaches her job and her life in the same way the athletes of her native Greece did long ago: “I try to excel,” she says.

“To do my best—not in competition with others, but for the satisfaction of knowing I’m trying my best.”

Fofi came to the United States in 1964 on a Fulbright scholarship in social work. She’d been a social worker in the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees in Athens. At the University of Minnesota she met her husband-to-be, Jacque. The couple moved to Albuquerque in 1969 after Jacque accepted a position with Sandia National Labs.

Today she’s a balanced blend of Greek and American, and a firm believer in the benefits of the cross-cultural life. “Of course you pay a price—leaving behind your homeland and family—but you gain the enrichment of combining the best of both cultures.” That, Fofi says, would be the humanitarian values she gained from her classical Greek education and the American freedom for individuals to pursue their personal and professional goals.

Fofi pursued a new professional goal after her two children were in high school. She studied accounting first at TVI, then at UNM, and began work as an accountant in Continuing Education in 1988. Over the years, she has worked to upgrade accounting practices and procedures and to implement computer usage.


“Of course you pay a price—leaving behind your homeland and family—but you gain the enrichment of combining the best of both cultures.”


Continuing Education has kept Fofi busy with more than books, however. She teaches modern Greek and serves as a resource person to other University departments, the community, and APS regarding Greece and the Greek language. In the early 90s she initiated a program titled “Greece: Gateway to the Cradle of Western Civilization,” a series of lectures about and visits to archeological sites in Greece. She made four trips to Greece over the decade, and says the experience of sharing her native culture with students, staff and other New Mexicans was “life-enriching.”

In fact, the melding of Fofi’s career and life events into a harmonic whole has left her with a feeling best expressed in Greek: she says she is “eugnomon” that the University has given her such rewarding opportunities. That’s not just grateful. Not even Grateful. Perhaps GRATEFUL most closely reaches the heights of her gratitude.