Fight poverty- kill a beggar! -scrawled on a wall in La Paz

Bolivia, the country which, having been the richest in terms of natural resources- its silver spurring the religious wars that went on in Europe- have consigned it to now being the poorest in Latin America.

An American company, Bechtel, even used to own all of Bolivia's water- including that which fell from the skies- so that the local population was not even permitted to collect rainwater to clean their clothes. But you can smell; aside from the llama feotus' hanging in markets used to bring good luck, and the waste sliding down from the stalls overcrowding the city's steep streets, that things are heading for change here.

What is clear when you first make contact with this society that has overwhelmingly elected an indigenous person for the first time in Latin America is the all-round education, respect for culture and political awareness that even the poorest people have, suddenly now aware of their rights and how they can participate and succeed in bringing about change for themselves through their newly-consigned rights of universal education, pension and land rights. I have been fortunate enough to get to know some of the 'underground' artists organising themselves with rappers in Europe to speak of their views of coca leaf cultivation and global financial systems in their songs and they were very informed of Western culture which was not from Mtv. (When, in 2007, George Bush decided it would be best to wipe out cultivation of coca in Bolivia under his eradication programme in order to combat drugs, Evo responded by taking one of these leaves to the UN summit in Vienna and display its true colour as being green rather than white. The point was that the plant is only really used as cocaine in the West where social pressures lead us to taking drugs thinking it will help us, whereas Bolivians are more likely to use it in a 'maté' and drink it as tea against the altitude and fatigue, as it numbs these feelings a little).

On my way to visiting our microfinance project, I stand and wait for a bus at the lampost with the Evo Morales poster on it beside a trickling river of blood and a myriad of smells as unidentifiable carcasses of meat are being bartered for at the market. The bus is an American Chevrolet from the 60's, without fail packed with sweaty but patient schoolchildren and workers so that people have to hold on to the bus from outside the door; and pants its way up a steep hill very slowly so that sometimes some of us have to get out and encourage it with a push. Instead of seatbelts, we have 'En Dios Confiamos' branded across its front and the driver most enjoys singing with his eyes completely closed.
One usually gets off buses in Bolivia whilst they are still moving, probably because of how long it would take them to change speed and the way the drivers behind dont like to take their hands away from the horn (people seem to beep even when there is no one else on the road). Now at 4000m, you can feel the air thinning as you climb a few flights of stairs to the Haciendo Creciendo school but before you reach the top to catch your breath; you have been discovered, and a stampede of feet will come around the corner and climb or hug you, and the altitude is forgotten. The view from here is spectacular, and at the end of the day we often hold kids up so they could see. Their mothers are benefitting from our microfinance project whereby materials to knit fashionable clothes in the UK are bought together, as well as their food, to be then sold at our UK university campus.

The pictures the children draw of their own towns appear to be fantasy ones compared to the view from 4100m here. It also explains how the effects of climate change are quite undebatable in Bolivia. Many people told of how they used to only see white over the mountains and now, in the deepest part of winter, much of the largest mountain Illimani looks down at Pacenos* covered in a sludge that had caused mudslides and wiped out towns that had barely been recognised in the first place; maps used to show a green space where its indigenous population has always lived.

There are many reminders on the trip to school on how El Alto is the highest and by many measures the poorest city in the world, but its culture now thrives. Children as young as 8, although having to be 'employed' as shoe-cleaners and street-vendors to support their families with typically 6 mouths to feed, are even politically organised, getting together to propose a children's Constitution of Rights to the Bolivian government which has subsequently passed it as legislation after referendum last year. One of its clauses is not to get free sweets but to guarantee the right of every child to be taught in their native indigenous Aymara or Quechua languages as well as Spanish which makes a change from my Martinican students studying in Lycée Frantz Fanon without questioning why they were banned from speaking native créole. On this island too, a parallel cultural universe whereby Christmas comes with snow and Turkey in a place founded by 'our ancestors the Gauls' have finally been removed from children's textbooks.

By gaining literacy in one language, a child will no longer need to re-learn its principles in order to read and write in another. This is why respecting the language most spoken in their homes is making sense for them to enter even an increasingly globalised world. 'Kamisaraki!', you will be greeted, in Aymara rather than Spanish these days- the fact that primary schools be able to teach in the native Indian languages formerly slightly shamefully spoken at home rather than solely Spanish has been enshrined in the Bolivian constitution. A debate is currently being ensued in linguistics between those who feel speaking in one language impedes certain thinking that is represented in others and Chomsky-ists who would disagree. As language clearly represents not only words but ideas, being able to express yourself in the one most natural to you has clearly been positively influencing the direction of development in Bolivia, something which will need to be taken into account by policy-makers to come in contrast to its past.