With her long blond hair pulled up carelessly in a plastic clip, Petra Procházková is busy coordinating preparations for the night's event.

This sultry June evening in Prague her volunteer-based organization Berkat will bring together Czechs and foreigners, many of them from Muslim countries, to "dance against terrorism."

"Isn't this beautiful?" she says, holding an embroidered patchwork purse handmade by women in an Afghani village with no electricity. Procházková, 40, likes to spend up to 10 months a year in the country.

"This is what I like the most. It really reflects the Afghani temperament, their crazy soul."

Since 1992, Procházková, a correspondent at the Czech daily Lidové noviny, has been at the epicenter of the world's most brutal wars, including Chechnya and Georgia.

Her reports from Moscow and the North Caucasus helped keep Russian troops from releasing a bloodbath in Chechnya during the first war in the breakaway province in 1994–1996, according to fellow war reporter Andrei Babitsky, a correspondent for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

"In Yeltsin's Russia, journalism was a real leverage for influencing the course of events," Babitsky says. "Journalists had influence."

This desire to make a difference forms the bottom line of any activity Procházková is involved in, according to her friends and colleagues.

Which is why, when she realized new reports have little power to help people suffering in war areas, she switched to humanitarian activity and opened an orphanage in Grozny in 2000.

The same year the Russian government took away her visa and banned the veteran war correspondent from entering the country. The orphanage had to close down but she still operates a community center in Grozny through Prague-based Berkat.

"Petra takes close to heart the fates of her stories' heroes," says Oleg Panfilov, director of Moscow-based Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations.

"They are not just objects to her. She realized she could not change anything in Chechnya at that time through her journalism, but that she could by giving food and clothes to Chechen children," he says.

From fashion to war

Born to a traditional Czech family in a small village near Poděbrady, about 50 kilometers from Prague, Procházková's ambition as a child was to become a fashion writer. At the age of 18, she badly injured her leg playing basketball and was looking for a quiet job without too much activity required.

In 1989, three years after graduating from Charles University's journalism department, the young reporter joined Lidové noviny to become an advice columnist on women's issues, including birth control. Three years laterm Procházková went to Moscow for what she expected to be a three-month long reporting adventure.

She stayed for 10 years, covering wars in Georgia and Chechnya and interviewing Chechen field commanders, including Shamil Basayev, who later claimed responsibility for the siege of a school in Beslan in 2004 that claimed the lives of 344 people, most of them children.

In 1993, during the Russian constitutional crisis, when the Russian White House was besieged by troops, she became the only journalist who remained inside.

When Vladimir Putin succeeded Yeltsin as Russian president in 1999 and curtailed the role of the media in the society, Procházková, like many other journalists in Russia, became disillusioned.

"At that time, many people felt there was no sense in their profession if there is nothing they could do, if their each word was not bringing about tangible results," said Babitsky. "Petra felt this very strongly."

This realization spurred the humanitarian work that she now considers her free-time activity.

After being forced to close down the orphanage in Grozny, Procházková went to Afghanistan first as a reporter and later launched her charity work, which included organizing training for a doctor at a state-run eye clinic based in Kabul so that he could perform cornea transplants.

Community of friends

Procházková humanitarian work, although officially a hobby, serves as a pretext to spend time with friends and travel to Afghanistan and other crises-stricken countries at a time when no Czech media organization is willing to send reporters there for financial reasons.

"I don't want to be a professional humanitarian worker," she says. "Paid, professional charity work is repulsive to me." In addition, she says, "It is not healthy to help the needy from morning till night."

For that reason, Berkat, which means "happiness" in Chechen, remains largely a volunteer-based organization.

The charity only employs foreigners, often asylum seekers who would otherwise be jobless, and gives preference to women with children. Its first office opened in the center of Prague in May thanks to a European Union grant of more than 9 million Kč ($400,000), which meant Procházková no longer had to run it from her kitchen.

The center's main mission is to provide free service to asylum seekers and other foreigners struggling to create a new a life in the Czech Republic.

Women can leave their children here while running errands or sorting out paperwork. Berkat volunteers also help foreigners enroll in re-qualification courses to find jobs and runs Czech- and English-language classes as well as computer classes and therapy groups.

Women from dozens of countries also gather to cook ethnic meals that Berkat caters for various events, including a birthday party for former President Václav Havel, who gave Procházková the Czech Medal of Merit for her work in Chechnya in 2000.

She has no plans to turn Berkat into a fully professional organization.

"That would rob Berkat of its poetic side for me," she said. "The joy and enthusiasm that makes Berkat what it is would be gone. It would be a good organization but not a community of friends."

Friendship and tolerance, she thinks, is what is missing in a society divided by the "war of civilizations."

"Czechs understand tolerance as tolerating something they like," says Procházková. "But tolerance is about overcoming something in yourself because of somebody else. It is not about liking something and therefore eating it. We should admit there is another world out there that is quite different and may be unpleasant to us."

Personal journalism

Professionally, Procházková still makes her living writing for Lidové noviny and Slovak daily Sme. She covers the former Soviet Union and Central Asia, including Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan.

She is also the author of several documentaries for Czech television and two books about the lives of women in Chechnya.

The holder of two Czech national journalism awards regrets that in the era of the Internet, most Czech media organizations prefer to get reports from international news agencies rather than sending their own correspondent to crisis areas.