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Gregorio Enrique Torres Hernández’s entrepreneurship is called Creative Workshop and is focused on the visual arts, ranging from professional photography for social events, fashion, artistic activities, to personalized photos or contemporary abstract paintings made by himself.
For Enrique, the decision to migrate was born from the need to improve his an his family’s quality of life. According to him, “I wanted to give my son better opportunities in life, a future with more options, that would see in his life possibilities to broaden his interests.” For months he weighed options, limiting them to the small budget they had. Through his older sister, they were able to leave for Bogotá, but after a month of living there, they found it necessary to look for a better destination: Peru. At that time they were not aware of how being far away from Venezuela was going to affect them emotionally. “I think that one of the most difficult things is arriving in a new country to live and not knowing anyone,” he says, “we were our only support. It took us a few months to overcome that strong feeling of loneliness, although when we did, it somehow opened our minds.”
As he describes it, the fact that for many months they were forced to endure feelings of depression and loneliness, that didn’t stop them from fighting to start from scratch, no matter what it took.
Enrique is sure that it was the social loneliness and not having a network of support, that pushed him to seek the help of IOM , when a family friend gave them a link to apply and receive training and help in order to create a business. He immediately knew that his entrepreneurship should be a reflection of what he was really passionate about: making art and its universal language a way of life. In fact, his innate ability and creativity for painting, to which he had integrated photography at the age of twenty-five, gave him security when it came to knowing the product he was going to work with.
That was the reason why Enrique’s life changed when he found out that he had been selected for the Business Plan workshop. He had the product and would learn a method, in an Organization like IOM to which he will be forever grateful, since they think of people who migrate urgently, which integrates and directs the entrepereneuships of people in difficult situations. That has been a blessing for him. Although he considers that another great gift came later: the possibility of participating in Mentorships with people who had migrated like him and his family, who lived in the same city. He refers to it in his own words:
“I have to say that those sessions made me reflect, analyze and discover new things about myself. I personally felt that they helped me become a better person. I am not only referring to the professional field, but also on a human and personal level. The mentoring made me more empathetic, with the result being an improvement in my business. I began to understand my clients more and better. They awakened new ideas that I took to the arts workshop. I think it was seeing how my change had a positive impact on my business that I opened an extension that will soon see the light: art workshops for children and adults.”
