AUBURN – One tries a spin on a mountain bike. Nearby, a trio finds that a basketball doesn’t quite respond to their kicks the way a more familiar soccer ball would.

A half-dozen others watch their colleagues’ antics from a patio off to the side of Leighton Cooney’s home. Another handful, wine glasses full, chat in the living room.

On the surface, and as a group, they’re clearly relaxed.

That fact has Cooney smiling. He’s their host. He wants his foreign guests to enjoy this small slice of Maine not far from jewel-like Lake Auburn.

After all, they’ve had a busy schedule.

And they face some heady issues: Joining the European Union, for example, and NATO membership.

Even as Cooney prepares to fire up the grill in preparation for the barbecue to come, several of his Macedonian guests stroll the expansive grounds, cell phones firmly held to their ears.

They’re getting updates from home.

Only hours earlier Thursday, Macedonia’s coalition government struck a long-sought deal guaranteeing ethic Albanians a power position in local government.

Aleksandar Novanovik, one of Cooney’s guests, said the 2001 peace accord with the Albanian community put to rest the strife that had seen government security forces forcefully clash with Albanian rebels. The accord reached Thursday paves the way for local elections that Novanovik said are scheduled for October.

Novanovik is secretary general of Macedonia’s parliament. He and the others are part of a delegation brought to the United States by the State Department, said Cooney, under the auspices of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The group visiting Maine and Massachusetts for the past two weeks includes members of parliament, judges, law professors and others charged by their government with reforming Macedonia’s legal system.

Such reform, said Nena Ivanovska, legislative coordinator for AID contractor DPK, will be broad in scope and full in nature. It will affect the nation’s entire judicial system, including civil and criminal courts, as well as law enforcement.

Now, says Novanovik, the judicial process is lengthy and ill-structured. For Macedonia to gain membership in the European Union, he adds, it must be reformed.

It is, he says, also a vital step toward reforming and improving his country’s economy.

Ivanovska and Cooney, a mortgage banker and community development advocate, noted that corporations now must petition the courts to start doing business in Macedonia.

The delegation Novanovik heads is looking at how such things are done here. Cooney points out that a business starting in Maine can do so over the Internet, via a special Web site set up by the secretary of state’s office.

Novanovik said he and others in the delegation have met with judges, legislative leaders, and even Gov. John Baldacci in the quest for knowledge of how things work here. Novanovik himself is particularly interested in how laws are drafted, and then enacted.

He notes that while Macedonia has a state history dating back 1,000 years, it has been an independent nation only vince 1991, when the former Yugoslavia disintegrated, part of the end of the old Soviet system.

Novanovik said Macedonians are looking to the United States for leadership and guidance. His countrymen want to be America’s allies, he said, noting that Macedonia has sent troops to Iraq to demonstrate its friendship and support.

“America is a very nice country,” he said.