Four who live south of the border

2. James Cummiskey

Courtesy of Christian Gonzales/Cima Coffee Farms
James Cummiskey walks near one of his coffee farms.

Visited a friend in Medellín, Colombia, and then decided to move there.

• A couple can live modestly in Medellín for $1,400 a month and well for $2,500. A two-bedroom apartment in a high-end area goes for $700 a month.

• Drawbacks: Driving is tough, pollution can be noticeable, and poverty is widespread. Crime is down dramatically from the cocaine cartel days of the 1980s but remains a worry in some neighborhoods.

• Pluses: clean city, cheap living, great climate, vibrant culture, friendly people.

• "I tell you honestly I have had more fun here in the past four years than in the previous 50."

2 of 4

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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