* * Hosting our new friend Pedro from Bolivia

It has been an exciting week!  We have a guest staying with us from Bolivia.  Here’s the story.
I have been selected to lead a GSE (group study exchange) team to Bolivia, leaving in four weeks and staying there for five weeks.  This is a program sponsored by Rotary International to foster international good will. The experiences range from cultural to recreational to vocational. My team is comprised of four teachers who live in Lexington, Elkton, and Front Royal.
The exchange means that a team from Bolivia comes here.  They’re here now and Jane and I are hosting the team leader, Pedro Loza.  Pedro is a family man with a wife and three boys, ranging from 25 to 17.  He is a quiet man, polite, with a subtle sense of humor.  His native language is Spanish, but his English is very good.  He’s working hard to help me improve my Spanish.  He is very close to his wife and he communicates via computer every day. He’s repeatedly tried to drag me to Wal-Mart with him, unsuccessfully.
Our local Rotary Clubs are showing them around Blacksburg, taking them to many of the tourist sites and businesses tours that we who live here would enjoy if we could ever find the time and the contacts.  They’ve been to:
    The Virginia Museum of Transportation in Roanoke
    The National Weather Service
    The Virginia College of Osteopathic Medicine (VCOM)
    The Floyd Country Store
    The big Kroger warehouse in Salem
We’ve taken them to our best restaurants and to several Rotary Club meetings.
Pedro is an electronics engineer specializing in medical equipment.  He’s been to the states before. I asked him what he found most surprising and interesting on this trip. He said he was impressed by the level of technology we have in town, something he expected only to find in the larger and more prosperous cities.  At VCOM yesterday he saw high-tech mannequins used for allowing the students to get true-to-life experiences with patients without the fear of killing anybody. The mannequins breathe and have a pulse. Their eyes respond to light.  The have simulated pregnant women and infants.
At the Weather Service, he learned how they receive data and photos from satellites and weather balloons they send aloft each afternoon.  He told me the computers generate several models for what may occur in the coming days but the meteorologist still makes his best judgement based upon earlier experience to forecast what he expects to happen.
Aside from all the site visits, we’re spending time together simply building friendships.  Pedro and I drove to Lexington (VA) on Sunday to meet with my team.  We had a chance to discuss the political and economic situations in each country.  Cultures vary wildly around the world, but I find whenever I meet people from elsewhere that there is more that binds us than separates us.
On Saturday, I had a ticket to the basketball game between our Virginia Tech Hokies and the Duke Blue Devils. Duke was the top ranked team in the nation and the defending national champion.  Our Hokies won the game!  I went by myself but I didn’t have a ticket for Pedro, so he watched on TV from the house and became a Hokie fan.  The last game of the season is tonight and I have found a ticket so he can go with me.
Tomorrow we say goodbye and he and his team leave for Nelson County, their next stop.  Jane will say goodbye to Pedro and his team likely forever, but I will see them all again when I visit their country next month.  It will be wonderful to see familiar faces when we arrive in each new city.