People

By Guy D. Garcia

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.