Enedina Avilés sits on a rocky ledge surveying the city below. She comes to this spot every evening after spending the day earning a living peeling garlic cloves. “This is her moment of meditation,” says Peruvian photographer Alex Kornhuber.

Avilés’s home, a wooden shack with no running water or electricity, is perched on a hillside on the southern outskirts of Lima. She lived in the mountains for most of her life but moved to the city seven years ago after visiting her son and finding a small patch of land where she could build a house.

Kornhuber first met Avilés, 67, in March 2020; since then he has visited her 10 times, getting to know her better each time. Her life has been one of “heartbreaking” hardships, he says. Given away at birth to landowners, she raised livestock until she married at 15. She had seven children, two of whom died, and endured years of physical abuse by her husband.

“She has diabetes and high blood pressure but is happy where she is, even though to most of us, it’s a desperate situation,” says Kornhuber.

Avilés is one of dozens of older people Kornhuber has met over the past two years of an ambitious project to document how Peruvians age in different parts of the country. In 2019, he won a fellowship with the Global Brain Health Institute, which brings together people from diverse disciplines and professions to inform new approaches to brain health across the wo

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