The Foreign Service Journal, March 2015

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MARCH 2015 65 n Marianne Collins Ahlgren, 77, the wife of retired FSO Charles Ahlgren, died on Oct. 8 in Providence, R.I., after a long struggle with the rare disease amyloido- sis. Mrs. Ahlgren was born in Oak Park, Ill., on Oct. 3, 1937. After graduating from Siena High School in Chicago, she joined the Sisters of Mercy and attended St. Xavier College, earning her B.S. in education and speech. She went on to teach at several parochial schools in the Chicago area. During her summers, Mrs. Ahlgren completed a master’s degree in audiol- ogy from the University of Illinois. She went on to teach at St. Xavier’s, where she started a clinic for deaf children in the wake of a rubella epidemic that swept the Chicago area. She later worked as an audiologist at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago, Riverside Hospital in California and Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C. After marrying, she accompanied her husband to the U.S. embassy in Singa- pore, where she taught at the American School and gave birth to the couple’s two children, Ingrid andTheodore. She joined her husband in subsequent postings to South Africa, New Zealand, Thailand and Venezuela. Wherever she lived abroad, Mrs. Ahlgren actively worked with the poor; she helped women in the teeming camps outside Cape Town and victims of sexual trafficking in Chiang Mai. Her greatest love, however, was for the deaf. She was a leader in deaf education and linguistics research. While in New Zealand, Mrs. Ahlgren received a Ph.D. in applied linguistics from Victoria University in Wellington. Her dissertation discussed New Zealand Sign Language as a full-fledged language, with a large vocabulary of signs and a consistent grammar. As a consequence, IN MEMORY NZSL was recognized, along with Maori, as an official language of New Zealand. She authored numerous articles in sci- entific journals and wrote sign language versions of children’s books such as The Ugly Duckling . After the couple retired to Rhode Island in 1999, Mrs. Ahlgren worked at the Rhode Island School for the Deaf and was an active volunteer in many charita- ble organizations, including the Scandi- navian Home and the Great Strides Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. Mrs. Ahlgren was predeceased by her parents, Timothy and Lucille Collins of Chicago, Ill. She is survived by her hus- band, Charles; daughter, Ingrid of New York, N.Y.; son, Theodore of Hamden, Conn.; and granddaughter, Annika Liu. The family requests that any memo- rial contributions be made to the Senior Living Foundation at 1716 N Street NW, Washington DC 20036-2902. n Natale H. Bellocchi, 88, a retired FSO and former ambassador to Botswana, died on Nov. 17 at his home in Bethesda, Md., of heart disease. Mr. Bellocchi was born in Little Falls, N.Y. He earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1948. He worked as an industrial engineer at the Burlington Mills Corporation for two years before serving as a U.S. Army infantry officer in Korea from 1950 to 1953. In 1954, he received a master’s degree from the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown Univer- sity. He began his Foreign Service career in 1955 as a diplomatic courier, with postings to Frankfurt and Manila from 1955 to 1959. He was posted to Hong Kong as a gen- eral services assistant in 1960, and two years later was transferred to Vientiane and commissioned as an FSO. Detailed to the Foreign Service Insti- tute Field School in Taichung in 1963 to study Chinese, he was then assigned to Taipei as a commercial officer. In 1968 Mr. Bellocchi returned to Hong Kong as a commercial affairs officer. He was then detailed to the U.S. Agency for International Development and sent to Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), where he worked for 18 months, before being assigned to Tokyo as, suc- cessively, commercial officer and coun- selor for commercial affairs. In 1974 Mr. Bellocchi was selected for the Senior Seminar. A year later he was detailed to the Treasury Department to focus on developments in Asia. Postings followed in New Delhi as an economic counselor and Hong Kong as a deputy principal officer. He returned to Washington, D.C., in 1981 to serve as deputy assistant secre- tary in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. In 1985, President Ronald Rea- gan appointed Mr. Bellocchi ambassador to Botswana, where he served until 1988. Five years later, President George H.W. Bush appointed Amb. Bellocchi to chair the Board of the American Institute in Taiwan. During what he described as “the most difficult and historic journey” of his life, he accompanied Taiwan President Lee Teng-hui to the United States. Pres. Lee was denied permission to meet with the Chinese-American com- munity in Honolulu and allowed to visit Cornell University, his alma mater, only after members of Congress pressed the administration. Beijing responded to the visit by firing missiles to ratchet up ten- sions in the Taiwan Strait. After retiring in 1995, Amb. Bellocchi continued to follow Taiwan develop- ments closely and advocated increased international agency and U.S. govern-