SCSRN founders Richard and Lonna Harkrader are here in San Ramón right now on their annual visit. They take this time to visit project sites, meet with old friends, and re-kindle their connection to the community. After a visit out to a cacao cooperative that is part of our cultural immersion ecotour, Lonna decided to… Read More →

This past Friday, our team went out to the community of San Martín to celebrate with music, balloons, food, and a piñata for the children. The celebration was the culmination of the construction of a water system that has brought water to each home in this rural community. There were speeches, words of thanks, and… Read More →

Returned Peace Corps volunteers (RPCVs) Jenn Rowley and Joe Daniels spent a week in San Ramón visiting with old friends and building improved wood ovens in the rural community of San Roque. We asked Jenn to share her reflections on their time in San Ramón. “La Carretera se ve bien nueva” remarks my long-time buddy… Read More →

As we shared in an earlier blog post, we were honored to receive members of the South Granville Rotary Club, who financed the renovation of the rural high school Julian Barni in the community of Samulali and then spent a week training 12 young people in electrical installation as they wired the entire school. At… Read More →

Finally! We are very happy to have some news to report about the water project in San Martin. To be honest, I have been putting off writing this blog post. While we have been working with the community leaders and City Hall to form a Community Water Committee that will be in charge of maintaining… Read More →

Our founder, Lonna Harkrader, shares about a visit from Larry Gomez, our former Tourism Coordinator, to North Carolina recently. If you went on an ecotour in the past 7 years, you were guided around by Larry Gomez, our young and vibrant Tourism Coordinator. He impressed our visitors with his ability to solve any problem and… Read More →

For those of you just tuning in, we held a fundraiser in May to build a water system in the rural community of San Martín, located in the coffee-producing zone of San Ramón. This system is intended to provide water for 86 families that were given land titles as part of a government settlement program…. Read More →

Beginning in 2015, we began to notice that when we talked to community leaders in the rural areas of San Ramón, the conversation kept going back to one topic: water and sanitation. As one community leader told me, “You can live your whole life without electricity or without going to school, but you can’t go… Read More →

A lot of jokes, memes, and gifs are floating around right now about how much we all want 2020 to end, and it does feel like 2021 is a light at the end of a long, dark tunnel. But if we’ve gained anything from the experiences of this year, it is perspective. It seems as… Read More →

When our new fiscal year began in July of this year, we hit the ground running. Here’s a quick review of what we’ve done since then: We’ve provided materials for 34 latrines for rural families in two communities of San Ramón. Since we started our sanitation project with the rural women’s group UMOYS in 2017, that… Read More →