12/23/2023 0 Comments Gladys tejeda en londres 2012![]() We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. 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’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. 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. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.īut you know what? We change lives. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.” My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. ![]() “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. "Through hard work and discipline, you can overcome any hardship."Ībout 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”: "She is an example for the rest of Peru," says Sebastián Marambio of the Olympian Athletic Association of Peru. ![]() The London Games will be only her third marathon. She qualified for the Olympics during her first marathon, in Seoul, South Korea, last year, and then captured the bronze medal in the Pan American Games in Guadalajara, Mexico. Since then, her rise has been breathtaking. In 2009, the reputation of the "girl from Junín" spread, and a Peruvian trainer offered to teach her with a group of other budding marathoners in the state capital, Huancayo, 100 miles away. The next year all the local races paid off. She only started again with the coaxing of co-workers at the flour factory where she worked. Her father had also died and she had quit running for a year. The longest she had ever run was 50 minutes. After all, Tejeda, who was 22 at the time, had never competed in a professional race. Her older brother Jorge turned to her, as the family sat transfixed, and asked: "Why don't you run in the Olympics?" The Tejeda family got its first TV in 2007, and it was the next year that Tejeda learned about the Olympics, watching the Beijing Games. Resilience ‘When will this end?’ In Gaza, tough questions from kids. When her mother needed cooking oil or sugar from the store, she would dispatch her youngest "because she would just run, run, so fast," says her mother, Marcelina Pucuhuaranga. Tejeda always got the job done the quickest. Each day the kids had to shepherd cows to grazing areas, an eight-mile round trip. Her parents and siblings knew she was fast. "We couldn't afford shoes, or plane tickets to compete abroad, or for me to do nothing but run." The four boys and two girls each started working at age 8, selling fruit or helping in the fields. Her parents were subsistence farmers who earned income by taking care of others' animals. She was the youngest of nine children (three of whom died at birth). She was the best runner in Junín as an adolescent, but her aspirations never expanded much beyond local races and the small-town recognition that came with it: a bit of cash, pencils or notebooks for school, some running paraphernalia.Ĭompeting professionally was the last thing on her mind. Tejeda, age 26, will be representing Peru in the women's marathon during this summer's Olympics in London. But just over a decade later – and only four years after watching her first Olympic Games – Ms. Besides, she was just concerned with finishing: She didn't own running shoes and only found a pair to borrow right before the race kicked off. Her family didn't own a TV, and no one amid the mud-brick homes of her town ever talked about them. She didn't even know what the Olympics were. She was certainly not thinking about Olympic glory. ![]() Gladys Tejeda was a teenager on the starting line of a four-mile race through the chilly Peruvian highlands of her hometown, Junín. ![]()
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