My name is Victoria Romero; I am an Internationalist and Defender of women’s rights, feminist, advocate, and president of the MÉTODO WOM organization to empower women and defend their rights.
In addition to Victoria, the professional, I also am dreamy, critical, passionate with enormous social sensitivity. Since I was a child, I felt a great interest in human relationships. I sang protest songs with my mother related to emigration, politics, and world poverty, and I cried while watching documentaries on global warming… At that time, I only had one thing in my mind: “When I grow up, I want to change the world.”
In 3rd grade, I met my all-time favorite teacher, Nieves Fernández. This Spanish woman spent valuable time in her class to enlighten us on general culture topics, and she always bragged about how things were in her country.
She would tell us how clean everything was, how respectful people were, and how they behaved as good citizens. I was a girl, but I immediately related what the teacher said with what I saw in Venezuela. I was nine years old when I decided to start an awareness campaign with adults because I thought that I would find solutions to the problems in their hands. There was only one thing going through my mind: changing my country and changing the world.
As I grew, this feeling was exacerbated. I decided to study International Studies because I realized that adults could not help me on the scale I wanted. This time I was going for more: now I needed the help of governments and countries. During my studies, I strengthened my leadership skills, and it was there that Victoria, the feminist, was born in me.
After graduation, I had some jobs that helped me grow personally and professionally, but it was in a Human Rights NGO that the purpose became the cause, and the cause became my lifestyle: defending the human rights of women.
It was then that I decided to embark on my journey as a feminist activist, I moved on to phase two of empowerment. It wasn’t enough for me to empower myself, but also to help empower others. I not only wanted to assert my rights, but I also wanted to assert everyone’s rights.
At that moment, I began to create a feminist network of women from all over the country; women defenders, activists, of all shapes and ages, with different ideas, but with great conviction and purpose. At that time, I led the Amnesty International Venezuela Network of Women, and we began to go out into the streets.
Our first appearances in public places were difficult, there was no feminist culture, and there were very toxic stereotypes of the movement; they called us “feminazis,” pro-abortion and there were macho comments like: “men also suffer from violence,” “let’s talk about human rights from a general perspective,” etc. There, I understood that our work had to be greater; we had to sensitize people, women and men, girls and boys, because achieving equality requires teamwork.
That is when COVID-19 came into our lives. This pandemic affects more women than men, and due to my despair, I decided to turn my ideas into solutions, and that is how what I consider to be one of the most important projects I have ever had was born: MÉTODO WOM, my feminist movement to defend women’s rights, female empowerment and the promotion of peace culture.
MÉTODO WOM was born to save women, but also to save me; what began as a training program today is a nationally and internationally recognized organization that has empowered more than 1000 women around the world, which has 10 regional representations, with many allied organizations and a solid team that day by day fights for equality, the empowerment of women and the defense of their rights.
In MÉTODO WOM, leaderships of all topics converge; it is a community that empowers from the beginning because you deconstruct, shape, and promote the development of other women and, you help creating forceful solutions for the problems that arise.
Once I achieve at least more than half of what I aspire to with my organization and the feminist movement in Venezuela, I would like to take this experience to international spaces and offer help from a global perspective within the United Nations or an international organization to bring the benefits of gender equality to the entire continent and the world, why not?
I believe that the road to success begins with self-knowledge. From there we extract our strengths and weaknesses, which makes us super powerful people because we all are unique human beings. If we know our tastes and passions, we will be close to connecting with our life purpose. Once we have this, we must empower ourselves in deeds, purposes, and actions, without forgetting that “leadership is service” and that all our gifts must be at the service of humanity.
I hope, and I know that this will be the case, that more women become empowered, that men and women can unlearn the patriarchal culture that has done us so much harm and open ourselves to creating an egalitarian culture without discrimination.
Once someone told me that, to achieve big goals, you had to start by taking short steps, and then another person told me to not talk about going little by little, but about doing things “step by step” to attract everything you have in mind, and I think they are right.
Today I feel happy because people’s response is different, and because more and more people are joining us and want to contribute to our cause. Now that I am an adult, I am more certain than ever that my dream of changing the world is possible.
Photo: @leosequera
Translated by: Pascual Díaz
