Bertha Murillo, currently VP of Membership of Los Oradores Toastmasters in Des Moines, Iowa, has been a member of Toastmasters since 1988. First as a member of the Executive club. Then in 1990, together with Salvador Salgado and Enrique Peña, founded and chartered Los Oradores, the first bilingual club in Iowa where members can improve their communication and leadership skills in English and Spanish. Los Oradores has been a very successful club for 36 years and Bertha has held all the officers positions numerous times. She is passionate for Los Oradores and goes beyond what is expected for her club to thrive. She holds multiple roles during meetings when necessary. She has also been involved in competitions to continue her personal growth and is now taking a new challenge as Area Director 14A, Division 211.
Bertha retired in 2016 from DuPont Pioneer where she worked for 26 years holding different positions, and her last responsibilities were as a global cross regional analyst coordinating the sorghum product line logistics worldwide. Her duties included helping the production plants create their conditioning schedules to package sorghum with specified treatments, phytosanitary requirements, appropriate tagging, units of measure, to arrive within the planting window of each country worldwide. In addition, she assured the documentation had the correct price, quantities, shipping, and freight requirements. Bertha was born in Mexico City, she immensely loved communicating in her native language while working with colleagues in Spanish-speaking countries.
Bertha is very proud of being part of Toastmasters International and enjoys talking openly about the membership benefits. She likes planning open houses and her most treasured experiences are seeing new members becoming more self confident, better communicators, and being promoted into new positions. Most of Los Oradores members leave the club due to promotions and new professional opportunities, usually away from Iowa. Los Oradores continues being the only bilingual Toastmasters club in the state of Iowa. Throughout the years the club has had members from 22 different countries and from all the world continents, except Antarctica. Bertha jokes that the club meetings look like the United Nations because there are usually members from at least 8-10 different countries in attendance. Her favorite quote is from the movie Field of Dreams: “If you build it, they will come.”
Outside Toastmasters, Bertha enjoys travelling with her family all over the world, family gatherings, water aerobics, Tai Chi, volunteering, gardening, spending time with grandchildren and great-grandchild Haze.