About Diana

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Diana Schaffter is a teacher, educator, international speaker, mother, and grandmother. Diana is no stranger to adventure. She is fluent in Thai, has traveled to over fifty countries, raised her two boys overseas, and lived in seven countries in Asia and Eastern Europe for forty-two years, including two years in Pyongyang, North Korea, where her husband worked for UNICEF. Diana has worked with Cambodian refugees, taught in international schools, opened schools in Thailand and Vietnam, and has been an educational consultant to non-governmental organizations and the Ministry of Education in Laos. Wherever she has lived, Diana has witnessed the power of human resilience, cooperation, and caring, which inspires her writing. Diana and her co-adventurer husband now live in Sidney, BC, Canada, where she continues to write, give talks in schools and communities, and work with young people.

 Some of Diana's most unusual adventures to date have included:

  • Conducting a participatory training for teachers in Pyongyang, North Korea at the invitation of the Government—amazed that they invited an American!

  • Training television staff in Laos in story-telling techniques for the first nationally-produced children’s television program called “My Village”.

  • Working in remote hill tribe villages in Laos developing low-cost teaching materials for community-based kindergartens.

  • Training illiterate women to run a day-care center in a coastal fishing village in southern India after their center was destroyed in the 2004 Tsunami.

  • Helping diffuse ethnic tensions between Romanian and Hungarian teachers in Transylvania, Romania by leading Peace Education workshops.

  • Convincing communist authorities in Hanoi, Vietnam to give her permission to open the first private preschool in Hanoi.

  • Coordinating humanitarian assistance in Cambodian Refugee camps (including a Khmer Rouge camp) on the Thai-Cambodian border.

  • Training a nutrition survey team in Cap Haitian, Haiti, in the Haitian creole language.

  • And . . .  what her husband is most proud of . . . in rural Thailand, successfully backing away from a cobra standing with its hood fully extended, ready to strike!

Some Favorite Quotes:

“Nature can win if we give her a chance” - Jane Goodall

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” - Mark Twain