Dressed in a casual, salmon colored quilted jacket and gray pants, she greeted her visitors graciously in the waiting room and ushered them into the meeting room herself. She cleared a few things away and straightened the terra cotta throw on the comfy blue couch, patted the cushion and invited us to sit wherever we like. The walls of the sunny, wood paneled room were lined with black and white portrait photos of First Ladies of Guatemala since 1945. Hers would soon be hung in its place.

As she was growing up in Sweden, winters seemed “so long, so dark and so cold” to Ambassador Maria Leissner. “Finally, the sun came back and the snow disappeared. The first thing to come up was the tussilago, the first spring flower, the first sign that there is life on this Earth, like the hope of future.”

More than 60 U.S. volunteers ended a week of work in the Guatemalan highlands and gathered for a celebratory banquet recently at the Porta Hotel Antigua. The volunteers were members of Helps International, a U.S.-based non-profit organization, and they were celebrating another successful trip into the highlands to administer medical care to rural poor who otherwise would not have been able to afford it. Although Helps is not as well-known as the Peace Corps, its stature was indicated by the fact that the guest of honor was the new first lady of Guatemala, Wendy Widman de Berger, who arrived to a standing ovation.

Monterrico is changing, but into what? One can almost imagine thousands of migrating Pacific turtles waiting with bated breath offshore for the answer. Still a fishing village but already a resort bathed in sunlight and the white-noise lullaby of the surf, Monterrico has the distinction of being inside a nature reserve set aside largely for ocean-going chelonians. Today this town in a coastal plain — ironically named “Rich Mountain” — stands at an evolutionary crossroads.

Eddy Ruíz Umaña’s employers at a Guatemala City hotel wish they could clone him. He cannot clerk there 24 hours a day, much as everyone — especially guests — would like. Sometimes he works nights, sometimes days, sometimes graveyards. That is the hardest part of his job; after several years, his biological clock needs an occasional rewind.

More people have seen ‘Gone with the Wind’ than any other movie; an ageless film, it still occasionally pops up in Guatemalan cinemas. On that basis, Vivian Leigh (Scarlett O’Hara) is probably the most famous person ever carried off with the hacking wind of tuberculosis, which took her at 54. Impoverished Central Americans suffering from what used to be called “consumption” might take comfort in knowing this, since both Vivian and Scarlett were well-bred aristocrats who braved sickness without shame.

Two unlikely arrivals in Honduras more than a century ago were William Sidney Porter (1862-1910), better known as O. Henry, perhaps the greatest American 20th century shortstory writer, and Alphonso (Al) Jennings (1863-1961), attorney, train robber and Oklahoma gubernatorial candidate who ultimately ended up in Hollywood, California, working in the motion picture industry making Westerns. However, these two pals came to a near fatal adventure on the north coast of Honduras and wound up serving time for other escapades in the same U.S. prison.

Chocolate is a nearly universal affinity, so there was nothing odd about Antonio Chávez liking it. But two things set him apart: his Mexican forebears had gobbled chocolate centuries before Europeans even had sugar; and his freakish devotion bred a chocolate dynasty.

Could a snake eat a banana? Once upon a time the keepers at Quetzaltenango’s Minerva Zoo had little to lose by experimenting. A vegetarian snake, had they produced one, would have been worth its weight in platinum. Of course they failed, but their live-and-let-die policy continued: they lived it up while the animals died. The place had become, in a word, a zoo. But one day Lucy Guzmán crashed the party.

You may have been urged to think “outside the box” to be creative on occasion. This idea can be readily applied to how one envisions the Lake Atitlán Basin. The normal focus of the lake basin is on the majesty of the lake itself and the inside slopes, which naturally draw one to it. But there is fascination to be had on the basin’s outer face as well. Los Tarrales Nature Reserve, on its south side, is a good case in point. Tarrales are bamboo thickets, plant life here that shares space with a profuse variety of tropical and sub-tropical flora and fauna.