COURAGEOUS KIDS; BOY, LIFE-SAVING DONOR MEET AT LAST.

Byline: Yvette Cabrera Daily News Staff Writer

Amador Navarro had never met the woman who saved his life.

But on Thursday, the 7-year-old boy got a chance to embrace Christina Ozaeta, a year after she donated bone marrow that has helped help him beat leukemia. Amador shyly hid behind a bouquet of flowers, as Ozaeta knelt and planted a kiss on his cheeks, and then hugged him.

``I feel like I have inherited a family - this is my family,'' Ozaeta said, wiping away the tears after meeting Amador and his mother, Alejandra Navarro, at the Los Angeles offices of the American Red Cross.

Seconds later, the boy's mother and Ozaeta stood face to face with tears streaming down their faces and embraced.

``There are no words to thank her for what she's done for us,'' said Navarro, 33, a mother of three. ``She's like a member of our family.''

Ozaeta, who grew up in Canoga Park and Lake View Terrace and now lives in Las Cruces, N.M., said the decision to become a donor was a tough one.

``To be honest with you, I didn't want to do it, but children have a huge heart,'' Ozaeta said. ``I love my daughter, she's healthy, and I thought, well I've been blessed, maybe I should do something to help.''

Under rules of the National Marrow Donor Program, which facilitated the transplant, recipients and donors are not allowed to meet until one year after the transplant.

``He's been anxious to meet her,'' said Navarro, who helped Amador write thank-you letters to Ozaeta. In addition to the letters, the two families communicated by phone for the first time at Christmas.

Before becoming a bone marrow donor, Ozaeta was unfamiliar with the staggering statistics that tell the story of how difficult it is for members of ethnic minorities to find matches outside of their families because of a lack of awareness of the importance of becoming a donor.

Ozaeta quit her job as a medical transcriber in January 1998 to devote herself full time to her crusade to educate the Latino community about bone marrow transplants. She travels to community colleges and high schools throughout the Southwest carrying her message.

``I used to be shy, but I'm not anymore because when I found out how bleak the Hispanic children's picture was in their search for bone marrow transplants, I really got involved,'' Ozaeta said. ``I said, Something's got to be done.

``We need to be educated as a community because our children are our future and without us to help them we'll continue to lose more and more sick children.''

For Amador, whose background is Mexican, the chances of finding a match are somewhere between one in 100 and one in 1 million because there are so few Latinos registered as marrow donors, according to the Red Cross. A patient's most likely match, outside of the immediate family, is with someone of the same racial or ethnic group.

Of the more than 3.4 million volunteer marrow donors registered with the National Marrow Donor Program in Minneapolis, only 7.6 percent are Latino, 7.8 percent are African-American, and 5.8 percent are Asian-American or Pacific Islander.

Since the creation of the donor program in 1986, it has facilitated nearly 6,500 transplants between whites, compared to 436 of Latinos, 306 of African-Americans, and 202 of Asian-Americans or Pacific Islanders.

In Amador's case, the Los Angeles Red Cross hosted a half-dozen bone marrow drives and came up empty. It then turned to the National Marrow Donor Program, which found Ozaeta.

It was Ozaeta's daughter, Crystal Rose, 15, who inspired her mother to become a donor after she saw a news report of a mother pleading for donors to cure her dying daughter.

In many ways, Ozaeta and Alejandra Navarro are flip sides in the same movement. Ozaeta mainly speaks English and targets the youths in Las Cruces and El Paso, Texas. Navarro, who speaks little English, makes her appeals to the Spanish-speaking families in the San Fernando Valley.

She spends her free time taking Amador to bone marrow drives in places like the Panorama Mall, Santa Rosa Church in San Fernando and on Olvera Street in downtown Los Angeles.

``Thanks to God, who found (Ozaeta), my son is still here with me today,'' Navarro said. ``I invite the Latino community to please register to donate bone marrow, blood, whatever they can to save the life of a child, like my son's life was saved.''

CAPTION(S):

2 photos, box

PHOTO (1 -- color) Amador Navarro, 7, gets some encouragement from marrow donor Christina Ozaeta.

(2) Amador Navarro's mother, Alejandra Navarro, left, gives Christina Ozaeta a hug to thank her for the transplant that saved her son.

Gus Ruelas/Daily News

Box: Bone marrow drive