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Readers write: Up to date on Central America news, children and play, and real meat

Letters to the editor for the March 18, 2019 weekly magazine.

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Santiago Billy/AP
People gather in Guatemala City Jan. 9 to show support for the Constitutional Court, which blocked President Jimmy Morales's decision to end the United Nations International Commission Against Impunity.
  • By Monitor readers

Up to date on Central America news

The Jan. 11 Monitor Daily article “Why Guatemala’s 180 on corruption matters for Central America” was a very interesting article. Please keep us posted on any further developments in Central America that threaten courts, anti-corruption efforts, and agencies. 

I speak Spanish and would like to visit Nicaragua for farming and other mission activities. I need to be kept posted on what is happening there with government crackdowns on citizen freedoms, instability, and violence. These recurring articles that you do on the same troubled location or problems and proposed solutions are why I continue to subscribe to both your daily and weekly news publications and tell others about them.

Nancy B. Chandler

Phippsburg, Maine

Children and play

As an early childhood professional, I enjoyed the Jan. 8 Monitor Daily article “Mexico tells early learners: You need to play more.” I’m wondering how widespread the traditional, strict, no-play approach actually is. 

Several years ago, I spent a day in a Chihuahua state kindergarten where the children were given literacy and math lessons but also had plenty of free play. In fact, for a while they played tag by jumping from table to table in a fashion that no American lawyer would have permitted in any classroom.

Suzanne Krogh

Bellingham, Wash.

Real meat

Regarding the Feb. 18 article “Why farmers have a beef with alternative ‘meat’ ”: I understand the environmental effect, but what about the effect on possible loss of cattle ranches? 

Some of us enjoy the taste and experience of eating real meat.

Betty L. Tuttle

Columbus, Ind.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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