About Us

The namesake of our foundation, Elizabeth Mayo was a woman who embodied all the values that we hold sacred. She was born in Cumana, Venezuela, September 4, 1950, to a humble family of modest means. Despite suffering a great deal of childhood tragedy, she finished high school, married, and moved to Barquisimeto where she settled in and began her ministry as Ama de Casa.

Evangelization through hospitality was her chosen vocation, her calling, abiding a deep sense of duty to create a space, loving and compassionate, where there were rules and order far removed from the chaos of the world and the danger she had once known. Here, the table was sacred and bread was broke and stories told and children would gather. Her home was welcoming to all people of goodwill and the smell of baked treats and wonderful things created with the work of her hands, lifted into the air and mixed with the warm chatter of those who dinned there.

For 24 years, Elizabeth Mayo submitted to her cross permitting herself to be cared for night and day, bathed, and dressed. And for sure she suffered, but this suffering was not in vain for out of its shame grow those virtues that bejewel the soul and our so pleasing to our God. And thus, she lived. She travelled. There was joy in her living and a love for life. And through it all, she never ceased to be the Ama de Casa. She answered the end to which God sent her into the world, and hence the master chef became the master teacher and she finished her course, won her crown of glory and claimed her portion of eternity.

She was a woman without guile, and there was no shortage of love, often meted out with a necessary firmness that willed the good of her guest regardless of their perception at the time of its coming. Despite her lack of formal education, her genius was betrayed through baking, ceramics, and oil paintings, forms of art where precision and exactness flow from the seat of creativity endowed from above and cultivated within out of respect for her craft.

Evangelization through hospitality was her chosen vocation, her calling, abiding a deep sense of duty to create a space, loving and compassionate, where there were rules and order far removed from the chaos of the world and the danger she had once known. Here, the table was sacred and bread was broke and stories told and children would gather. Her home was welcoming to all people of goodwill and the smell of baked treats and wonderful things created with the work of her hands, lifted into the air and mixed with the warm chatter of those who dinned there.

But the storybook of our lives is not authored by our own hand and sometimes we are led to a place not of our choosing. Isn’t it funny how life flows unnoticed and lulls the sense of our own fragility until a sudden rupture in its smoothness changes things forever? It is the cataracts of our lives that define us and mark our seasons. Within a fraction of a second, this woman, our namesake, was asked to bear a cross few souls are so privileged to carry when her spinal cord was transected and La Duena de la Casa would never rise to walk again.