Marisol on her way out for work at 9.30am on a Sunday in Lima, Perú.
She travelled with her daughter Nakhia, the boyfriend and her son by bus during the 2016 huaycos of Piura and had to be flown into Lima on an Hercules (a brazilian military plane). She worked various jobs such as cleaning a gym, a promoter for a dentist and cooking. At almost 60 years of age she experienced all forms of harrassment and inappropriate groping and is currently in a complicated relationship with a Peruvian man.

"My kids got offended that I did not remember we spent my birthday together crossing the border of Peru and Ecuador. But it just slipped my mind. It is one of those things I have been slowly forgetting...

Before coming here I thought I was coming to a first world country. My daughter kept on saying that everything we would be looking for Peru would have it. It was extremely difficult for me, as everything I had to let go of I had put together over the years. Now I have made it a bit of a joke. There is a lot of advancement in Peru and a lot of resources. But I had a lot of reality checks during these last 3 years. First we realised Lima was not like what we saw in Google. I also wanted to create a small business and this was my intention, to be able to add to the peruvian economy. I had big dreams but the reality is that making an income to build a small business is not easy. The legal system keeps on changing for us and I don't want to do anything informal."

Isabel, with a hamza pendant, sitting on her bed in a room she shares with her son and daughter in law Maria José in a barrio called San Juan de Miraflores in Lima.

"I am terrified every day. If I am on a bus, I do not speak to anyone. I have stopped talking to people because I don't want them to know I am Venezuelan. If I am in an Uber I monitor it very carefully. I don't know what would happen to me if the driver did not follow the route. I would jump out of the car. You watch and read the news and it just makes you want to disappear.

Mi amor this and mi amor that. That is how we speak to each other. We are very warm and we like to flatter and joke but that is just who we are. I have been here less than a year and I would go back to Venezuela to stay away from this harrasment."

I had not planned to speak to Isabel, as I had been put in contact with Maria Jose through Yamilcris, her cousin. She did not warm up as quickly as Maria Jose but when Isabel started speaking, she was close to yelling, making her fear and frustration very apparent. I sat on their bed as she ranted and reminisced. Isabel works as a stylist in a barber shop owned by a Venezuelan man, where she feels safe and at home.

Yamilet, lives in a small room with her daughter Yamilcris, her son, grandson and son in law.

She arrived to Lima after her daughter and currently works as a house keeper. She had a really bad experience working at a restaurant where she was constaly sexually harrassed and yelled at without getting paid for her extra hours or without being able to complain to the manager in fear she would not get paid or in fear of her safety. It took an hour before she started speaking to me, finding her voice and manner to be quite soft and gentle. She has a very light sense of humour but when I started photographing her, her face went serious with her eyes looking away softly, pondering.

"Do not call me veneca. It is not in my plans to steal someones husband. That is something I do not understand, here in Lima, women treat us even worse than men. At least you know a man would be physically violent, but a woman will make the sterotypes that are already formed about us even worse. There should be more understanding between women, but the judicial system does not favour us, not even as a peruvian."

Maria José, from Yaracuy, watching DirecTV after painting her nails. She is 24 and 2 months pregnant.
"Venezuelan women love to look beautiful. We dress well and we are very lively. Here people do not understand that it is part of our culture. They look at it as if we were exposing our bodies sexually when all we are doing is just feeling good about ourselves.

I do not want my child to grow up feeling this unsafe, specially as a girl. I want to go back to studying in Venezuela. Biology is my passion, but for now I am doing what I have to do to save up to move away with my husband."

Maria Jose spoke without taking a breath for one hour straight. It was really entertaining to listen to her as she kept on making jokes and acting out her own reactions to fear or situations of stress she had experienced, making us all laugh in the room. Her story was very straightforward though, even as she tried to keep up her humour and her tenderness.

Nakhia, 28, currently working at a cafe in Miraflores. Nakhia remembered her past experiences working at other restaurants with one particular man stalking her for a few months as she eased into her new life in Lima. She recalled switching jobs to a very opposite side of town and one day finding the same man waiting for her outside of the restaurant. He said he had seen her walking by and that he recognized her by her rear end.

Yamilet and Yamilcris from San Felipe, Yaracuy, Venezuela.

Yamilcris (27) and her son Luca (2) who had just woken up from a long nap.

"I travelled by bus with my husband when I was 4 months pregnant. Now we have been able to get the foreigners permit in Peru because my son was born in Lima so we don't have to leave.

I was sitting on a bench by the park and my husband who saw me from a distance said Yamil, look at you, you look like a little bird trying to chirp on your own. It has gotten quite lonely, specially overhearing conversations in buses or when we were crossing the border signaling at us and calling us murderers. I want to go back to study in Venezuela but my husband does not want to stay here on his own. I think being alone would kill him. Before my mum moved to Lima, I would cry every day. The loneliness and isolation was devastating for me.

We know we are in a foreign country and we know we are being taken in. I have had to keep my mouth shut so many times because I know this is not my country."

Yamilcris is the wife of one of the security guards of the building I live in. She has been working as a house keeper and she was the first person I spoke to for this project. Her husband was sleeping with Luca as we spoke for almost 3 hours. She later confessed that this was the first time she got to speak about this during the time they had been living in Lima.

Paolas little cousin. She was born in Ecuador to Venezuelan parents and now they live in Lima.

"I regret not spending more time with my parents now. Had I known this would have happened I would have savoured every moment because now there is no chance I will be with them again. The sticker we now get to validate our Venezuelan passports is about to expire for me so I have to figure out what I will be doing. I tried getting the passport permit for my parents in Chile but processing time is around one year.

Back in Maracaibo I knew my friends had my back all the time. Here I just don't know who to rely on. I started developing a lot of anxiety in the last few months before enrolling in Flamenco, something I had not experienced before. I have my Venezuelan friends but I find it difficult to form friendships without feeling worried. I don't even know how I could start developing a romantic relationshiip here.

It is so common to feel people groping my body on the combi or on the bus. By now I just elbow them and move on with my day."

Paola (28) studied engineering and currently works at customer service. We met a few months ago in a Flamenco academy but this was the first time we got to properly speak.

At around 9.45am, after Marisol left for work. Her brother had gone out to enjoy the day and her boyfriend was still sleeping.

When I first spoke to Nakhia she described the journey from Caracas to Lima as the biggest odyssey of her life. It gave me the feeling that what she had been living through felt more like fiction than reality. As we would say, la realidad supera la ficción (reality exceeds fiction).

Nakhia left Caracas after her boyfriend was encarcerated during a peaceful protest and was kept as a political prisoner. He was placed in one of the most dangerous detention centers called Helicoide and was only released after the intervention of José Vicente Haró a famous human rights lawyer. Nakhia remembers not knowing anything about him for 2 weeks. She didn't eat for days until she was able to locate him, having searched for him all over Caracas and its surroundings.

"I keep on telling my mum that history repeats itself. My grandfather arrived to Venezuela as he was fleeing Francos dictatorship. And now we are looking to go to Spain."

In this photo I tried to capture her through the lens of light and shadow that we find in rennaisance paintings, with simple and intimate imagery.

Nakhia (28) a few doors away from her house in Comas on a Sunday morning in January.

Yamilcris and Yosbert, her younger half brother. He was being cheeky and she wanted him to be presentable but his hair was all over the place.

Maria Jose, her husband and mother who was visiting from Venezuela as she announced that Kobe Bryant had died with his daughter.

Outside the house in San Juan de Miraflores, where Maria Jose and Isabel live.

Marisol, following her son Kevin (25) as he accompanies her to the bus stop to go to work.

"Something my children don't quite understand is that I am afraid of cutting all communication with this man. I am not sure if he is capable of going crazy and I do not want to find out. It has been my first relationship since the father of my children but I cannot stop thinking that maybe if I help him he will overcome his jealousy. He has called me Veneca before and said that we are all the same. I just don't know how I could sustain a relationship if he does not trust me or if he believes I would be unfaithful. I worry for younger girls more specially with all the news that circulate. There was a young Venezuelan women who jumped from a 4th floor because she overheard a group of peruvian men saying they were going to rape and kill her.

If I get harrassed and threatened as an older woman with more life experience, I can't even imagine what a girl would go through."

Nakhia inside her living room with Goliat.

Going up stairs to the roof top to watch the sunset after Marisol arrived home from work.

Marisol, Nakhia, Kevin and Yoel with their dog. The laundry line had fallen down so they were running to fix it.

Kevin, Marisol, Nakhia and her boyfriend Yoel.

During the sunset, after having had long conversations, I wanted to get a photo of all of them together which turned into a series of photos with mild humour in a family dynamic. In this photo, Kevin quickly said "pretend you are suffering" and dropped his head, while Marisol stared to the distance and Nakhia tried getting them to calm down.

I found this sense of humour, something I had witnessed before amongst Latin Americans but that I had not fully noticed as a very distinct cultural trait amongst Venezuelans. The joking and humour that comes along with difficult stories.

Sunset from the rooftop of the apartment in Comas, a northern district of Lima. Around one hour away by car from the malecón (the waterfront).

Marisol, Nakhia, Kevin and Yoel live together in this house where they have individual rooms. Over the 3 years they moved houses constantly, previously having lived in one small room the four of them together. Kevin wanted to move out, but when he was looking around for places, many people rejected him instantly, saying that they did not want a Venezuelan as a tenant.

Nakhia said that she thought the sunsets from the rooftop were even more beautiful than by the malecon.