People: Mar. 31, 1986

Greeted with flowers at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, Katerina (“Katya”) Lycheva, 11, smiled and said in her careful English, “I am very glad to see you, and I think we will be friends.” For the next two weeks, Katya’s mission is to meet American children “and tell them as much as I can about the Soviet Union.” Sponsored by the San Francisco-based Children of the Peacemakers, her visit was inspired by a similar 1983 trip to the U.S.S.R. by Maine Schoolgirl Samantha Smith, who died last summer in a plane crash and has become a hero in the Soviet Union. Katya, who has acted in a young people’s theater group back home in Moscow, plans to see the Statue of Liberty, Disneyland, NASA’s Houston space center, and Ronald McDonald. Though she brought a gift for him, the more important Ronald is not scheduled to see her.