Encoding string in UTF8 from list

Question

I'm having trouble formating the strings to utf-8 In this script im getting data from excel file then printing it out in a loop, the problem is that the string with special characters shows up wrong.

In result I keep getting 'PatrÄ«cija' instead of 'Patrīcija' Can't seem to find the solution for this problem

    #!/usr/bin/env python
    # -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

    import sys
    import xlrd
    import datetime

    def todaysnames():
    todaysdate = datetime.datetime.strftime(datetime.date.today(), "%d.%m")

    book = xlrd.open_workbook("vardadienas.xls")
    sheet = book.sheet_by_name('Calendar')
    for rownr in range(sheet.nrows):
        if sheet.cell(rownr, 0).value == todaysdate:
            string = (sheet.cell(rownr, 1).value)
            string = string.encode(encoding="UTF-8",errors="strict")
            names = string.split(', ')
            return names

    names = todaysnames()
    for name in names:
        print name

Answer 1

Changed encoding to iso8859_13(Baltic languages) and it fixed it.