[2] Later the family moved to the capital and largest city La Paz, where Sfeir-Gonzalez and her siblings attended the American Institute (also known as the Instituto Americano), a school founded by Methodist missionaries from New York and Illinois.
[4] She was also a co-founder of the University Student Theater at UMSA, helping to stage "Nuestra Natacha" by Alejandro Casona as the innaugural production.
[5] [6] [7] [8] Her paternal uncle was the Most Reverend Pietro Sfair, Titular Archbishop of Nisibis (Nusaybin) of the Maronite Catholic Church of Antioch.
[2] Her older sister Blanca Filomena Sfeir Cabero, an economist who earned a Master's degree in business studies from the University of Iowa in 1950, was the first woman from Bolivia to receive a scholarship from the Institute of International Education (the predecessor to the Fulbright Scholarship) and served as chief procurement officer for Corporacion Minera de Bolivia [es]—COMIBOL.
[9] A nephew was entertainer Alejandro Hangano Cassab (el "Gran Sandy", famous for his summertime appearances at the Festival de Vina del Mar in Chile.
[4][13] In January 1965, Nelly Sfeir Gonzalez read a classified note placed in a La Paz newspaper by Laura Gutierrez Bauer, a German-Argentine residing in Bolivia, offering private German lessons.
[15] Mrs. Gonzalez thought that Miss Gutierrez Bauer was a highly skilled teacher, who had the latest in miniature tape recording equipment.
She died of gunfire on August 31, 1967 in an ambush as her guerrilla column attempted to ford a tributary of the Rio Grande river in eastern Bolivia.
Walter Gonzalez a la Excelencia Académica for the top civil engineering student in the graduating class at the Universidad Mayor de San Andres.
[16] Sfeir-Gonzalez has twice received the José Toribio Medina Award from the Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials, first in 1987 and a second time in 1995 for her work on Gabriel García Márquez.