Didrik Schanche
Didi Schanche is NPR's chief international editor. Her team of correspondents, based around the world, is on the scene for breaking news and specializes in coverage of issues of international policy and national security. NPR's award-winning international coverage is consistently recognized for its excellence.
Schanche also serves as NPR's Africa and Latin America Editor.
A journalist since 1981, Schanche landed her first reporting job as freelance correspondent for The Jerusalem Post in Cairo, Egypt. She returned to the United States and got a master's degree in journalism from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism in 1982. With the ultimate goal of becoming a foreign correspondent, Schanche spent several months banging on doors and was hired by the Associated Press as a reporter based in Montgomery, Alabama. After two years, she was transferred to the foreign desk at AP headquarters in New York. Two years later, she was sent to Nairobi, Kenya, to cover East Africa.
Schanche was East Africa Correspondent for the Associated Press for seven years, producing news stories and features from Sudan and Ethiopia in the north, to Zimbabwe and Zambia in the south. Much of the news in the region then, as now, concerned ethnic conflicts, civil war, drought, hunger, AIDS, and wildlife. She then transferred to Cyprus to edit AP's Middle East coverage. In 1995, she returned to the United States. She joined NPR in 2001.
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Correspondents, editors and producers from our newsroom share the pieces that have kept them reading, using the #NPRreads hashtag. Each weekend, we highlight some of the best stories. -
#NPRreads is a weekly feature on Twitter and The Two-Way. Correspondents, editors and producers share the pieces that have kept them reading. Each weekend, we highlight some of the best stories.
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A medical mystery that started in Brazil. Nairobi's bustling food scene. Women and guns. And the man behind a new literary movement. -
For your weekend, here are three recommendations for stories that may surprise you about the rise of OxyContin, the fall of Venezuela and an undocumented immigrant who made money for Goldman Sachs. -
Liberia has started a campaign to get communities more involved in stopping Ebola. But even in the town handpicked to launch the campaign, a family of survivors has been ostracized. -
Outside St. Joseph's Catholic Hospital in Liberia, Dr. Senga Omeonga muses over the weeks he spent at an Ebola ward — not as a doctor, but as a patient. He says the experience was life-changing. -
The fast-paced board game — it's a lot like Parcheesi — offers a way to escape the stress of life in the Ebola zone. -
Samuel Gbarzeki is one of the many Liberians who stop by the Daily Talk blackboard to check out the news. The English professor has a lot to say about the latest headlines. -
Liberians aren't letting a brutal epidemic put a crimp in their amazing sense of fashion. The streets are still full of stylish folks, because as the local saying goes, "Looking good is business." -
President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf hopes to have no new Ebola cases by Dec. 25. But with the virus popping up in remote places and crossing over from neighboring countries, the battle is far from over.
