National Public Radio's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson must be ever mindful of who she is when reporting in Afghanistan, a world away from the university town of Davis where she makes her home.

Here in the Sacramento Valley, Nelson, 46, freely rides her bike, sits in outdoor cafes and shops for shampoo, DVDs and Peet's coffee.

In Afghanistan, she is a woman in a country where women are isolated, a reporter in a nation where people do not distinguish between U.S. government officials and independent U.S. media.

Through it all, there is the ever-present threat to her personal security from would-be assailants and potential kidnappers, who can make up to $150,000 selling kidnapped foreigners to the Taliban.

"The minute you walk out of your front door, you do a sweep," explains Nelson, who once faced down a group of Iraqis sent to drag her to a government-sanctioned execution, the result of a secret trial against her in Iraq. "Is anyone picking up a cell phone? Are you spending more than 20 minutes in traffic?"

The key, she says, is to keep moving and avoid establishing patterns someone else might track. Even the dog Nelson acquired had to be turned over to staff to walk. The regular routine of taking the animal out was just too dangerous, her staff warned.

In 2005, Nelson moved to Davis to take a job covering state government for the Orange County Register. A cousin lived in the college town, and Nelson found it an ideal place for her son, Stefan, to complete the high school education he had started in Israel where Nelson had worked as bureau chief for Knight Ridder.

Within 14 months of covering Sacramento, Nelson was itching to resume overseas reporting. In 2006, she jumped at the chance to initiate and head up an NPR bureau in Afghanistan.

After a few weeks of training, she was sent on her way to negotiate a lease for a four-bedroom house in Kabul, hire a small staff and haggle for necessities, including electricity, which sometimes requires bribes to ensure regular service.

Nelson's husband, Erik, stayed behind with Stefan, but has since joined his wife in Afghanistan. Stefan attends the University of California, Davis, and maintains the family home, where his parents return to de-stress from a life of constant vigilance.

"Sure, it's tiring," says Nelson. "But it's a great story from a journalistic perspective."

As an NPR bureau chief, Nelson has filed stories ranging from reports on Afghanistan's upcoming second presidential election – featuring incumbent Hamid Karzi and 41 opponents – to the fledgling Afghan Public Protection Force trained by the U.S. military to guard and protect neighborhoods near Kabul from Taliban and militant violence. She also reported on the battle between U.S. and Taliban forces in May that left 140 civilians dead in a remote western village.

Nelson's specialty, however, has become stories that male reporters in a Muslim country can never get because women are kept segregated from men who are not family members.

She has revealed secret schools for girls forbidden to take part in education, drug addiction among women and children, and once, when Nelson was working for Knight Ridder, a wrenching narrative from a Palestinian mother who had killed her own daughter to preserve what she felt was the family's honor.

Nelson describes the experience as "horrific," but she names it as one of the best efforts of a career that includes a 1997 Pulitzer for team reporting on the crash of TWA Flight 800.

"The fact that she's a woman probably gives her more access to Afghans than male correspondents get," says Corey Flintoff, a veteran NPR newscaster now working as a correspondent on the foreign desk.

"As a foreign woman, she can talk to Afghan men on a fairly equal basis, but she can go into people's homes and talk with Afghan women, which is something no foreign man could ever do."

Before NPR, Nelson worked for Holly Heyser in the Orange County Register's state capital bureau.

"The thing that stuck out to us about her when we looked at her clips is she really loves storytelling and telling the unusual story," says Heyser, who as state editor hired Nelson in 2005 to cover Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The daughter of an Iranian father who met her German mother as a university student in Milwaukee, Wisc., Nelson spent her formative years learning Farsi, and attending an international school in Iran while her father worked as an engineer.

The family left the country just before the fall of the shah in 1978, but that legacy of growing up between two worlds led Nelson to an interest in foreign reporting.

"I always had a hard time explaining who I was ethnically, and I felt Americans didn't understand the world beyond our borders," she says.

Nelson embraces her role as a storyteller in radio, where she says she can use sound and her own voice to illuminate a world that is so rich in history but so extremely poor that such necessities as clean water and literacy are virtually an impossibility.

"The country is really stuck in the place it was 500 years ago," Nelson says.

While Americans are most apt to focus on Afghanistan's political struggles and the 21,000 U.S. troops being sent to Afghanistan to reinforce security for the Aug. 20 elections, Nelson says the ordinary people she interviews have ceased to care about political outcomes.

"The point that is really striking me is that they don't care any more who wins," observes Nelson. "If that's true, what can we do with 20,000 troops?"