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 →

Our founder, Lonna Harkrader, writes about how San Ramón re-built its water system, and also how the community of Las Delicias came to have electricity. In 2002, the mayor asked SCSRN to help build a new water system for the urban area of San Ramón. During the rainy season, the water was dirty, and during… Read More →

We asked Carolyn Barrett, SCSRN Board member, to share her reasons for joining the SCSRN team and what the experience has meant to her. How Nicaragua? Why Nicaragua? It all started when I retired from a 30-year teaching career at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and was accepted to serve in the… Read More →

Everyone who has ever participated in our cultural immersion eco-tours has visited Los Pipitos San Ramón, and for many, it is the defining experience of their stay in Nicaragua. Since 1992, this center for children with disabilities has been transforming the lives of not only the children  that they work with, but also their families… Read More →

Our founder, Lonna Harkrader, reflects on SCSRN’s beginnings. Twenty-seven years ago, June 1993, a group of peace-loving activists from North Carolina visited San Ramón, in hopes of finding a community that would be interested in forming ties of peace and friendship with us. We had been involved in opposing the Contra War, one of the… Read More →

I imagine that the majority of you reading this are sheltering at home, as many of us are here in Nicaragua. Unfortunately, most Nicaraguans do not have the luxury of working from home, so many of the people that we work with in San Ramón have to continue to expose themselves daily as Covid-19 slowly… Read More →

Nancy Martin visited San Ramón on one of our cultural immersion ecotours in February, with the group Active People on the Move. Below are her reflections from her trip. For the past several weeks I have been able to think and talk of little else but the seven days I spent in Nicaragua on a… Read More →

Lonna Harkrader founded Sister Communities of San Ramón, Nicaragua with her husband Richard in 1993. They come down every year and spend some time in San Ramón to work with us and visit their long-time friends. I asked Lonna to share a little about makes San Ramón so special to her. Here is her answer…. Read More →

In general, all non-profits share certain day-to-day struggles: maintaining funding from year-to-year, stretching dollars to cover project costs, trying to keep operating costs down while still running an efficient organization, etc. But perhaps one of the most insidious and toxic problems is mission creep. Mission creep is when an organization gradually moves away from its… Read More →

This year, we welcomed Returned Peace Corps Volunteer (RPCV), Kate Crowley, to our Board of Directors. As an organization founded by RPCVs and led by yours truly, another RPCV, Kate is like a duck in water at SCSRN. We invited her to write about why she decided to get involved with our work. As a… Read More →