Long-time Santa Barbara resident Diana Haskins couldn't have pointed to Afghanistan on a map when her husband woke her up on Sept. 11, 2001 to tell her a plane had struck the World Trade Center.

"I watched the second airplane fly into the second (tower) and I was so completely devastated," she said. "I couldn't believe what I was seeing. My immediate thought was, 'What can I do to help?' "

Being a woman of faith, Mrs. Haskins decided to fast and pray and did so for nearly three days. "I was so upset I couldn't even eat," she said.

She eventually concluded that she would write a check, "a significant donation to the people of New York." But sitting down to do it, Mrs. Haskins had what she calls a profound feeling that the money should go elsewhere. But where?

After seeing an Afghan woman interviewed on CNN's "Larry King Live," she began doing Internet research on Afghanistan and the war-wrought devastation with which its people had to deal, especially women and children.

"I knew immediately where the money needed to go," she said. The money would go to help open a hospital for refugees on the Afghan Pakistan border.

Coincidentally, it was soon thereafter that Mrs. Haskins was contacted to organize a local fundraising event to benefit the efforts of the woman who was interviewed by Mr. King!

Then she had a dream, literally.

"What looked like thousands of Afghan women in blue burkas, arms raised, pounding on my door and they were pleading with me to help them. I woke up with an excruciating pain in my heart."

She was disabused of the notion that an American woman would get far in building a school or orphanage, so Mrs. Haskins turned to the idea of supporting existing projects in the country that sorely needed help.

That was the genesis of Afghan Academy of Hope, the organization she founded to help raise money for schools, orphanages, libraries and hospitals. Providing education, for which she sees an insatiable hunger, is among its primary goals.

The organization was even included in an ABC News piece by Bob Woodruff, who was later seriously wounded covering the conflict in Iraq.

"He used our organization as a channel for fundraising," Mrs. Haskins said. "We raised about $7,000 that we were able to take over to donate to a library project."

She departed on Wednesday, April 11 on her fifth humanitarian mission there since the fall of the Taliban regime that ruled Afghanistan with an iron fist before being ousted amid U.S. military intervention in 2002. The trips usually last three to four weeks and though she is not without fear, especially as the situation in the country deteriorates amid the Taliban's resurgence, she won't be dissuaded.

Mrs. Haskins even brought her son Preston, 18 at the time, on her second mission, in 2003, and marveled at the way Afghan children soaked up his attention.

"I've never felt threatened or endangered there," she said, noting that she dons traditional garb and manages to blend in. "I have been shown nothing but love and gratitude. The people are so loving and warm and appreciative. They have given me so much back. I came away with so much more than I could ever give to them."

Mrs. Haskins' says her work is not political. It does not involve trying to convert Muslims to her faith (she is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints).

Accompanying her on the trip will be Lynda Cook, an American who contacted her after the Woodruff piece aired. They were together on Mrs. Haskins' last trip, in 2005, and they have become close allies.

"We work really well together," Mrs. Haskins said.

How long does she plan on making missions to Afghanistan?

"I can't imagine not going back now that I have this relationship with these kids over there," she said. "They call me mother, or auntie. They do not want us to forget about them and I know what that feeling is to want to have someone love you and care about you."

As a remarried mother of seven kids and grandmother of three -- not to mention her Shih Tzu, Pomeranian, two Yorkshire Terriers and a rabbit -- she has plenty of reasons to play it more safely.

But as Mrs. Haskins puts it, "I really feel like that humanitarian work blesses our family a great deal. I want to leave a legacy. I want my grandchildren to know their grandmother is a survivor and the greatest gift is giving of yourself to others."