The Lowell Thomas Award 2009
Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson
Soraya Nelson’s original and poignant stories about the lives of the Afghan people demonstrate her enterprise and ability to penetrate a complicated society, especially since she was a woman working in a traditional male-dominated society. Even drug abuse is segregated by sex. We hear the cigarette lighters heating the heroin in foil. We feel the utter desperation of a mother who sends one of six children out to find her daily drug dose. Nelson embedded with both Afghan and American forces to tell the military story. But mostly she used her fluency in the language and her compassion for the people she met to make her listeners take notice and care about the people caught in a seemingly endless war.
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