Leibys Garcia combs her daughter's hair in the bedroom that they share as a family. The Garcia family left Venezuela in search of stable work and housing over a year ago, but in a country overwhelmed by the Venezuelan migration, Leibys ended up here in Alfonso Gomez where her husband built a shack home from materials collected from rubble.
Inhabitants of Alfonso Gomez make their way downhill on one of the main roads through the neighborhood near the Colombia-Venezuelan border on Feb. 15, 2020. Alfonso Gomez, an informal settlement built by Venezuelan migrants, is one among many "invasion neighborhoods" that have propped up as a result of Venezuelans fleeing their country's economic collapse.
Lisandro Sanchez and his family prepare to eat lunch while their dog wiats for scraps by the door.
Families in Alfonso Gomez subsist off beans, rice, peas with occasional meats like hot dogs. Families go to the Cucuta’s wholesale market, when transporters come to unload potatoes, onions, peppers, and plantains that will go to the city’s restaurants and supermarkets. Families beg for damaged items or donations.
Yenis Davila fills a container with drinking water from a storage tank in the backyard. Some families have received donated water tanks from charity organizations. Others keep multiple buckets of water filled to the top at all times – split between uses for drinking, bathing, and washing – never knowing when the line to the tap will be shut off.
Twin sisters Leismar Sanchez and Lismar Sanchez play on a hammock during lunch time.
Twin sisters Leismar Sanchez and Lismar Sanchez run into their home after getting off school.
Sonia Pimiento, settlement leader of Alfonso Gomez, inside her home.
Nicole Gulfo, left, does the dishes and her little sister Susej puts the bowls away in the oven.
“I want to eat before studying,” six-year-old Nicole Gulfo tells her mother Oriana Duran. “You’ll have to put up with your hunger,” Oriana says, fixing the collar of her daughter’s school uniform.
Yuri Castro, 32, sits with her children for a portrait outside their home. None of the children are enrolled in school. She remembers when she arrived nearly two years ago: “Those were the worst days of my life.”
She begged repeatedly for a plot in Alfonso Gómez before she was given a steeply sloping lot on a hillside. For a month, the family slept on the ground without a roof. They brought water down by bucket as they worked to dig a flat space out of the rocky terrain. A friend donated a tin roof.
Sonia Pimento, leader of the Alfonso Gómez community, holds a meeting to share news of NGOs coming to offer training in domestic violence and leadership.
Pimento assumed leadership after seeing a need to organise the newly arrived families looking to stake out land. As the neighbourhood grew, Pimento began to recruit other women leaders to help solve the needs of the community.
“Through training, people started seeing there was strength in unity.”
Ariana Bermudez nurses her baby on a makeshift bench outside her home.
Zoraida Espinosa, 41, sits inside her tin-roofed home, surrounded by personal belongings neatly stacked and arranged. Over time in Venezuela, the food ran out, the medicine ran out, and she ended up in Alfonso Gómez. “I don’t see the possibility of returning to Venezuela,” Espinsosa says. “My future is to keep working here.”
Espinosa hands out fruit tree saplings to Oriana Duran and other neighbors to plant near their houses. Espinosa, who has spent two years in Alfonso Gómez, tries to maintain a small but thriving garden in the neighborhood.
Espinosa also helps neighbors with their own plants. When one says he’s not sure if his tree will live, she says: “Make it survive; put wooden planks at its base so it doesn’t dry out.”
It will take a few years, she tells her neighbor in the sweltering heat, but eventually the tree will bring precious shade.