HUNTINGTON BEACH : Woman Gives Help to War-Torn Croatia

Huntington Harbour resident Sonja Hagel has traveled to the war-torn Balkans three times in the last three years: First as a tourist, then as a war observer and finally last month as a missionary of mercy.

During each visit, she watched helplessly as the land and people of the former Yugoslavia were ravaged by ethnic warfare.

For Hagel, the carnage was a call to action.

First she helped organize Hands Across the Sea, a pen-pal project that linked California children with those in the former Yugoslavia. And last month, she traveled to Croatia with six doctors and a film crew for Operation Second Chance, designed to bring medical aid to the injured and publicize the tragedy to rest of the world.

“I saw firsthand what was happening and decided I had to do something to help,” said Hagel, a registered nurse who works as associate administrator for Century City Hospital. “I felt I had to make a contribution to the situation.”

During the mission, doctors performed 30 plastic and reconstructive surgeries on war victims and briefed Croatian physicians on the latest medical techniques. In one case, American doctors prevented a man’s badly mangled leg from being amputated by performing a new treatment unknown to the local physicians.

Now Hagel is working to provide a prosthetic device to a Bosnian man whose lower leg was blown off. She is close to finding a doctor to make the artificial leg but still needs to raise the $3,000 required to build and ship the prosthesis.

“There is a whole generation of young people being disfigured because of the war,” Hagel said.

Most striking to Hagel is that a land of such natural splendor has been so starkly transformed into a grim war zone in just a few years.

Hagel first visited the Balkans in 1990 with family and friends. Full-scale war was still months away, and Hagel quickly fell in love with the region’s people and scenery.

But when she returned in 1992, everything had changed: The war had created a region of shell-shattered buildings and shell-shocked residents.

“The entire fabric of the culture is being destroyed,” she said. “The schools, the hospitals, the churches. Buildings that stood for centuries are being destroyed. They can’t be replaced. Everything that makes up the foundation of (the society) is being attacked.”

When she returned to California, Hagel immediately began organizing Operation Second Chance. She recruited doctors, raised $15,000 and last month returned to Croatia.

Her work has won praise from the Croatian government and Croatian-Americans, but Hagel says she has only touched a tiny fraction of those victimized by the war.

“It’s hard to relate the devastation,” she said. “I am just trying to give back what I can to the less fortunate.”