Photography by Raul Escobar Escobar
The mountains appear like distant shadows as the sun rises behind them and casts rays that dance on the water. The colors shift from gray to golden-pink as the lanchas begin to ferry people across the lake.
Nestled in the southwestern Guatemalan highlands, Lake Atitlán is considered by many to be one of the most beautiful lakes in the world. Aldous Huxley once wrote, “Lake Como, it seems to me, touches on the limit of permissibly picturesque, but Atitlán is Como with additional embellishments of several immense volcanoes. It really is too much of a good thing.”
It was this beauty—the landscape and the Guatemalan people—that captivated retired teacher Jackie Griffin, so much so that she moved to Antigua, Guatemala, in December of 2018. “She just felt like she found her home,” says Griffin’s daughter, Angela Kelly, an instructional coach in the Ladue School District.
It was “the heart and spirit of the people” that resonated with Kelly on that first trip to visit her mom. The mother-daughter pair bonded over their love of Guatemala and their desire to share that with others. It’s what motivated Kelly to book a Spanish villa for a month and host friends from St. Louis for a weeklong stay.
Photography by Donna Coble
Cheri Mebruer recalls gazing out of her airplane window before landing in Guatemala and seeing the green mountains, with volcanoes peeking through the clouds, and knew this trip would be a life-changing one. “It was like nothing I had seen from the air before,” she says. "It was all so green and so beautiful. And the villages on top of the mountains, they look like they’ve flattened out the hills and just put the villages on top."
For Donna Coble, coming to Guatemala didn’t take any consideration. She and Kelly had been friends for so long that even their moms were friends. She knew firsthand how much Griffin loved the country and wanted to experience it for herself. “Every time Jackie would come home from Guatemala, she would bring back a bunch of textiles to sell to support the school where she worked. I’d always go over to pick through the stuff to determine what to buy,” says Coble. “I could see how much Jackie loved being there. It was a big deal; she wasn’t a wealthy person, but she figured out how to make it work. It was almost like a calling. I wanted to go because I’d heard so much about the country from her.”
Lisa Rose’s son was in the Navy, so she’d taken a couple of overseas trips, but “nothing like Guatemala,” she says. “Everything is like a little discovery. There’s not a sign that says, ‘Here’s a restaurant.’ We’d walk down an alley, and then—boom—there’s a beautiful restaurant with fabulous food. Everything turned into a surprise.”
Photography by Donna Coble
Jackie Griffin and Lisa Rose
Perhaps the biggest surprise for Rose was when the group was taken to a chef’s home for dinner. They had requested to visit a specific restaurant, but their guide told them that it was closed and took them to a different location. As they began ordering, they noticed that the chef would run to the market and return with the ingredients to make the dishes. They thought it was unusual that the restaurant wasn’t stocked with ingredients to cook what was on the menu—and then they realized that he was cooking for them in his home. Their guide had taken them to the home of the chef who worked in the restaurant that they were initially hoping to visit. “I love that he was so proud that we were in his home, and he was serving us this delicious food,” Rose says. "It was a great experience."
They filled their days with early lancha rides to different towns across the lake, where they explored, tried new foods, participated in cultural experience, and hiked into the mountains with hopes of seeing a quetzal, the national bird of Guatemala—which they did. They even let me, someone they had just met, drag them through the woods on a muddy path in flip-flops to get to a wine bar that was worth the hike.
Photography by Donna Coble
Clockwise from left: Jen Roberts, Cheri Mebruer, Angela Kelly, Donna Coble, and Lisa Rose
On their way home, everyone stopped in Antigua to see the city and meet Griffin, who'd been so instrumental in helping plan their trip. Griffin took them to her favorite Irish bar, where she introduced them to her friends.
Kelly was the last to leave the lake and make the journey to Antigua. She was hoping to spend some much-anticipated time with her mother, but she found that her mom wasn’t answering her phone on her way. Kelly called a neighbor, who went to check on Griffin and found her unconscious on the floor. Kelly arrived in time to accompany her mother in the ambulance and say her goodbyes.
The unexpected death of Griffin, from what doctors suspect was an aneurysm, loomed over the trip. The women tried to make sense of their experience in Guatemala and grapple with the fact that the woman who inspired the trip and who served as their tour guide in Antigua was gone. For Kelly, however, it deepened her love of the country. She was embraced by the Guatemalans who knew her mom.
“I’m more in love with Guatemala than I was before. I’m excited to go back and see my mom’s friends, who are now my friends,” she says. “That’s what my mom would have wanted—she loved bringing people together. And now, in her passing, she’s brought people together from different cultures and backgrounds. That’s what she loved.”
