I don’t think I ever liked official visit. This one was okay. Kerry is easier to work with than Clinton was. My part was to set up a Science w/o Borders event for Secretary Kerry. The Minister of Education Mercadante was the official host. We didn’t have much time to make it work, but it worked wonderfully.
Science w/o Borders, called officially Science Mobility Program in the U.S., is a great program. More than 10,000 students have gone to the U.S. since June 2011, when the program was officially launched. I wrote more about it here.
Our Brazilian students brought some of their devices. There were lots of interesting things, such as bionic limbs. map making flying robots and other measuring devices. Secretary Kerry spent time looking at all of them and asking good questions. He did very well.
One of the best parts of the program came to us by serendipity. In the building were about thirty English Teaching Assistants. I opened their seminar earlier in the morning and we invited them to be part of the event. They were very enthusiastic, and Sec Kerry seemed to have a really good time talking to them.
Here are a couple of links in Portuguese here and here; even if you cannot read them, the pictures tell the story.