World cheers arrival of Bolivian bundles of joy

BABY Maya Condor doesn’t know it but her birth in a Bolivian delivery room this week was celebrated by strangers as far away as Brussels, the United States and Ireland.

Maya was born in a clinic 4,000 metres up in the mountain city of El Alto, a once sleepy settlement on the outskirts of La Paz that in recent years has experienced an explosion in population that leaves it rivalling the capital for size.

The average resident is a poor Aymara Indian, one of Bolivia’s largest groups of indigenous people, who have abandoned the toil of tilling the countryside in the hope of a better life as urban dwellers.