SEQUIM — Call it Mexican soul food.
This Sunday morning, a team of volunteer cooks will whip up breakfast: corn tortillas, scrambled eggs with cheese, tomato-chile salsa, black beans, sliced oranges, Raven’s Brew coffee and tea.
This is the annual Mexican breakfast at the Sequim Prairie Grange Hall, 290 Macleay Road, to benefit the Mujeres de Maiz Opportunity Foundation, the Sequim-based nonprofit organization co-founded by retired Spanish teacher Judith Pasco.
Pasco, seasoned cooks Steve Gilchrist and Molly Rivard, and other Mujeres volunteers will host the event from 8:30 a.m. until noon, with admission a suggested $10 donation.
Pasco began the foundation in 2006 as a partner to women in Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state.
In her book, Somewhere for My Soul to Go: A Place, A Cause, A Legacy, Pasco writes about the women, their rural communities and her dream of helping girls in Chiapas stay in school.
Scholarships to women
Mujeres de Maiz — which in English means “women of corn,” Mexico’s sustenance — started out by awarding one scholarship to one young woman.
In the eight years since, the organization has expanded to fund 19 scholarships — an average of $930 for a year of secondary school or college — as well as enrichment programs for children, eye examinations and glasses, and even a community center in the city of San Cristobal de las Casas.
Support from people on the North Olympic Peninsula grew the foundation through donations and the annual Dia de los Muertos dinner.
Great Nonprofits
In 2014, the foundation received the highest rating from Great Nonprofits (www.greatnonprofits.org) for the second consecutive year.
The Mexican breakfast, the third annual, is a relatively new event, and the cooks plan to keep it simple.
And yes, the salsa is “a bit picante, but not over the top,” quipped Gilchrist.
Mujeres de Maiz has much to celebrate in this first fundraiser of 2015: three new scholarship girls, each starting sixth grade in Chiapas.
National awards
The foundation’s first-ever scholarship recipients, Xunca and Yoli Hernandez, recently traveled to Mexico City, where they received national awards for their work with young people and literacy in the Mayan language of Tzotzil.
The sisters started a children’s program, funded by Mujeres de Maiz in 2008; then both women graduated from university in 2012.
“They are using their education in their own community to encourage children,” Pasco writes on the foundation’s Facebook page.
“They are role models to girls, awakening in them new life possibilities. This, in a nutshell, is what Mujeres is about. Congratulations, Xunkita y Yoli, for all your hard work and tireless efforts.”
To find out more about the Mujeres de Maiz Opportunity Foundation, see www.MujeresdeMaizOF.org, and for details about Sunday’s Mexican breakfast, phone 360-683-1651.
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Features Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5062, or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
