My entry for the 7 DAYS STEEMIT B&W URBAN PHOTOGRAPHY CONTEST by @flamingirl #2

I had saw poverty in my country in so many ways that it becomes normal, people asking for money in the streets, homeless kids selling news papers and a blind society who doesn´t seems to care about other thing than themselvs.

Caracas was a city of contrasts, you could find the fanciest neighbourhood next to a dangerous slum and the concept of good an evil change easily as crossing the street, the police was almost like a double agent, in the day they used to safeguard the rich people but, frequently, they was also the bad guys whom everybody was afraid of at nights.

When I moved to Panama everything seems to be very different, you can feel the security in the streets, people was so opened up about their personal issues that I forgot all about the poverty I saw until I get into a photo documentary project called Teen Moms, it was a serie of portraits of teen moms and their stories and I was the one who had to found them and convinced them to let us photograph them with their kids.

We where into very poor neighbourhoods and slums hearing the stories of almost 50 girls who were silenced and forgotten, a few of them lived in trailers give it by the government in a place without law named Barraza, no police were allowed there, if you wanted to get in you must have a respected godfather in the area to guarantee your protection. You could see the gangs each one in their territory, negotiating with drugs at 9am in front of the kids who played whit mud instead of playdoh, surrounded by garbage and eating rice and eggs 3 times a day because they have nothing more to eat, with moms who wait there for the help of the government who doesn't even know they exist and super sisters like this who care about her little brother because she´s the older of 5 kids of a single mom.