A world of care

48 years of nursing, 53 countries visited, countless lives touched

By MSU Alumni Foundation

August 25^th, 2025

At 69 years old, Diane (McClurg) Sanders ’79 has visited 53 countries and looks forward to adding more stamps to her passport. Through her travels, she’s seen the iconic rock-cut architecture in Petra, Jordan. She has marveled at the pyramids in Egypt and the Acropolis in Athens. She’s witnessed police officers riding camels in Qatar and a firework show on a military base in Saudi Arabia. She watched dancing dragons ring in the Chinese New Year in Malaysia. She lived in New Zealand for three years and India for one. She gave birth and raised young children overseas.

From Turkey to Thailand, Sanders has visited corners of the world many will only ever see on TV or social media. All of her globetrotting adventures were made possible by her job as a nurse. Sanders never thought her career would take her around the world to hospitals in places she’d only dreamed of, if she’d heard of them at all.

“I am incredibly lucky I get to travel the world for my job,” she said.

Before her globetrotting career, Sanders had been on exactly one domestic plane ride. Growing up in Indiana, she thought the biggest, bravest move she would make was attending college in Bozeman, Montana. Though she had never visited the Treasure State, she wanted to take a risk and try living somewhere new. What Sanders didn’t know was that after she completed her nursing degree at MSU and married her college sweetheart, Montana would be just the beginning of her life’s adventures.

One thing she knew for certain: she was going to be a nurse.

“Most of my life, really, I just knew it,” Sanders said. “Early on, I was actually a candy striper. But I knew I ultimately wanted to be a maternal child nurse.”

After high school, Sanders completed a two-year nursing program in Indianapolis and honed her skills working in a newborn intensive care unit. Then she decided she wanted more — she wanted a bachelor’s degree.

In Montana, Sanders quickly fell in love with MSU and Bozeman. She learned how to ski and enjoyed the hallowed tradition of spending good powder days at Bridger Bowl. While earning her nursing degree, Sanders met her husband, Joe ’79. Raised in Troy, Montana, Joe was a small town kid with big dreams of his own. After Sanders finished her degree in nursing and Joe his degree in Film and Television Production, the couple married in 1981. That summer, they both quit their jobs, put all their belongings in storage, and bought one way tickets to Europe to go backpacking.

“That was one thing Joe and I really bonded over, our love of travel,” Sanders said. “Sometimes our parents thought we were crazy.”

Diane with the Masaai Mara tribe in Kenya.

Eventually the couple bought their return tickets to Montana. Sanders got a job working in the labor and delivery department at Bozeman Deaconess Hospital, a position she held for two years before she and Joe decided to move to Seattle and pursue big city opportunities.

In Seattle, Sanders earned a master’s degree in maternal child nursing from the University of Washington. With an advanced degree in hand, Sanders found work as a perinatal clinical nurse specialist. After several years on the job, she got her big break for international work.

The opportunity found her while she was reading the American Journal of Nursing. The journal was advertising a role that fit Sanders’ skillset, just not her geographic location. The job was in New Zealand. Though it would be a big move, Sanders thought she might as well throw her hat in the ring.

“I’ve always had this philosophy, ‘If you don’t apply, nothing will happen,’” Sanders said. “I asked myself, ‘What’s the worst that can happen?’”

She got the job.

“I have had so many opportunities that nursing has given me to do different things, and grow and make a difference and get to travel. Nursing is an incredible field. I just don’t know of any other field that gives you these opportunities.”

This time, her international adventure would be for a family of three. In Seattle, the Sanders welcomed their first child, a daughter. By the time they decided to move to New Zealand in 1990, it was with a toddler in tow.

The family loved New Zealand immediately — the rugged beauty, the people and the culture. Sanders found she loved her job, too. While in New Zealand, Sanders gave birth to a second child, a boy, bringing the family roster to four. Sanders said that when her daughter attended pre-school, kindergarten and first grade in New Zealand, she developed a thick “kiwi accent” that made her and Joe laugh.

“It was pretty amazing living in New Zealand,” Sanders said. “In the early 90s, it was like going back into the U.S. to the early 1960s. Most women stayed home, which I didn’t.”

Raising a family and managing a busy nursing career made time fly. And after three years, the Sanders had to make a decision: hunker in and raise their children in New Zealand or return to the United States, nearer to family. Both Sanders and her husband are only children and wanted to be close to each of their parents as they got older.

Sanders and her husband decided they wouldn’t move back to Seattle — the city had gotten too big and busy for the young family. They instead decided on the Tri-Cities area in Washington, where they remained for the next 23 years. Sanders found work again as a nurse. Though she always saw herself as a charge nurse, she was quickly promoted through the ranks until she was promoted to chief nursing officer. The role was demanding, but she did find time for non-work trips to keep her love of travel alive. She took her daughter to Morocco and Spain before her daughter took off on her own adventures throughout Asia and beyond.

As life continued to speed along, Sanders remembers the moment she saw another job posting that would alter her life. This time it was from the Joint Commission International (JCI), an organization devoted to driving excellence in healthcare through adherence to best-practices. Seen as the gold standard for international hospital accreditation, the commission sets standards for different types of healthcare organizations including hospitals, academic medical centers, primary care, ambulatory and home health care centers.

“Joint Commission International is really about trying to focus hospitals on having higher standards for quality and patient safety,” Sanders explained. “Different countries tend to have different issues and standards.”

The job listing was for a surveyor. In the role, Sanders would travel abroad to monitor a hospital and its staff and then make recommendations to improve patient outcomes and hospital efficacy. The position was listed as an intermittent commitment, meaning Sanders would travel six times per year for up to a week at a time. The rest of the year, she hoped to keep her job as chief nursing officer. That meant telling her stateside boss about her sporadic overseas roles. She said, “Somehow I managed to convince my boss it was worth it and we made it work.”

That was nearly 15 years ago. Sanders found a way to juggle her busy domestic job and look forward to her JCI appointments that would take her around the world for up to a week at a time.

In 2015, Sanders was recruited to work as a chief nursing officer at a busy hospital in Mumbai, India. With her children grown and gone, Sanders decided she was ready for another international adventure. In India, there were many unique cultural norms to which Sanders and her husband had to adjust. For one, Sanders’ schedule looked a little different.

“We lived really well in India, because it was a very wealthy hospital I worked at,” Sanders said. “But I also worked six days a week.”

Sanders found she was able to build strong relationships with the nurse managers she worked with and was able to help them grow in their careers, which she says was one of the most impactful parts of living in India for a year.

“I still keep in touch with them,” Sanders said. “And when I go back to India, we have a reunion. I spent about two months in Qatar two years ago, and so we had a reunion there, also.”

After their year abroad, Sanders and Joe moved back to Washington, but this time to Olympia, to be closer to their daughter and put down roots in a new city. But Sanders kept traveling. She took in the stunning island of Barbados as she drove herself around the island in a little rental car. She met a herd of elephants in Thailand and rode a camel in Morocco. She spent time with the Masaai Mara tribe in Kenya. She marveled at Turkish architecture and took in incredible views and food on Lake Como in Italy. Sometimes she traveled solo, other times Joe would join her. Though many people find traveling alone daunting, Sanders looked forward to each new adventure.

“You have to take some risk if you’re gonna travel,” Sanders said. “If you’re gonna play it safe, then you’re not gonna travel.”

Some of that risk, she admits, was mitigated by the fact that she traveled for work, which gave her a sense of purpose and a way to meet local people.

“I have had so many opportunities that nursing has given me to do different things, and grow and make a difference and get to travel,” Sanders said. “Nursing is an incredible field. I just don’t know of any other field that gives you these opportunities.”

Though she’s closing in on 70 years old, Sanders said her plans don’t include retirement. Though she may consider decreasing her workload to half time, she says.

“I’ve been a registered nurse for 48 years,” Sanders said. “I feel like I have a lot to offer these different hospitals. As long as I’m making a difference and enjoying the travel, I could go on for years. Some of my colleagues have worked into their 80s!”

Sanders said that her time at MSU so many years ago instilled a belief in herself and “the ability to uproot to make a difference,” she said. From rural community health projects that taught her about working in new environments to having first-time adventures in Bozeman, Sanders credits MSU as a great launching pad for her life of adventure.

“If you would have told me at 20 I would be traveling the world, I would have said, ‘Really?’,” Sanders said with a laugh. “I’d only been on a plane one time and it was to California. But being lucky enough to live in Bozeman, it set the bar pretty high for the rest of my travels.”