TEEN YEARNS TO HELP HEAL HER HOMELAND.

Byline: Dennis McCarthy 

The day will come when this teen-age girl forced to flee Yugoslavia as a child will return to her homeland as a woman.

When 18-year-old Bojana Zdraljevic will return to the small village of Risan, on the coast in Montenegro, which she fled with her family as a 9-year-old girl just days before civil war broke out in 1991.

She will walk down the narrow streets of her beautiful hometown, and she will hug her friends and kiss her relatives. Then, she will get down to business, to the reason she will have come home.

Bojana will use her university education and the lessons she is learning from America to help heal and rebuild her native country.

That's the dream this 12th-grade honor student at El Camino Real High School has every night she falls asleep in her parents' Reseda apartment, she says.

It ends when the alarm clock goes off, and she rises to start another day of on-the-job training in America.

While her parents looked for jobs in the San Fernando Valley back in 1991, 9-year-old Bojana and her two younger brothers, Nikola and Stefan, sat in classrooms trying to understand this language they had heard so infrequently back home in Yugoslavia.

``We knew a little English because our mother is American, but we spoke Serbian all the time,'' she said Friday, waiting for the mailman to arrive at the Reseda apartment house her parents manage.

She waits daily for a letter from the University of California at Berkeley - from the admissions office to tell them whether Bojana's application has been accepted. This day it doesn't arrive.

It is at Berkeley that she wants to major in political science and minor in Slavic languages - there she thinks she will receive the best training in America to some day help Yugoslavia as a professional woman.

``I think more than her brothers she still feels this great affinity for Yugoslavia,'' Mary Zdraljevic said, while her husband, Sava, talked to his children in the next room.

``She has kept the (Serbian) language and still speaks it, ready for when she goes home.''

It was tough for her children to make friends after being uprooted from their country, Mary said. So, three months after they arrived, she and Sava had them join the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. That decision has paid huge dividends, they say.

``Through Girl Scouts, I learned all the different ways to help my community, and what was needed,'' Bojana said. ``It's had an amazing impact on my life.''

She didn't realize it at the time, but she was taking her first small step in her on-the-job training.

What was needed, Bojana saw, was help for the homeless families throughout the Valley, particularly after the 1994 earthquake destroyed so many homes and apartment complexes.

``I saw a lot of my own family in their faces,'' she said. ``We were basically homeless after leaving our home in Yugoslavia a few days before the civil war broke out.

``We came to Los Angeles to escape the war and to build a new life. I found myself empathizing with the homeless here, wanting to help them in anyway I could.''

Bojana began researching the homeless, talking to families living in shelters and cars to find out what one teen-age Girl Scout could do to help them.

The answer she heard the most was so simple, yet so overlooked by society. What they needed the most, the homeless told her, was simple toiletry items.

Last year, as her Gold Award project - the highest award a Girl Scout can earn - Bojana distributed more than 150 bags filled with toiletries to the homeless having their Thanksgiving meal at the San Fernando Valley Rescue Mission.

``Bojana cares very deeply about people,'' says Lois Young, troop leader of Senior Girl Scout Troop 823 in Van Nuys, Bojana's troop.

``A lot of girls are into makeup, movies and possessions. She's into people.''

Into getting the best possible on-the-job training America has to offer so she can return home a professional woman to help the country she was forced to flee as a child.

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Photo: Bojana Zdraljevic of Reseda, flanked by parents Sava, left, and Mary, plans to return to her native Yugoslavia as a living example of democracy's benefits.

Charlotte Schmid-Maybach/Staff Photographer