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African Reflections Foundation — non-profit organization 501(c)(3)

The ARF Archive · Tanzania

The Village Heart

The stories, photographs and people behind the beginning of African Reflections Foundation.

Where it beganExplore the book

Before there was a foundation, there was a village and a broken well.

In 2016 African Reflections Foundation published The Village Heart — a photographic record of its first years working alongside rural communities in Tanzania. It is not a brochure. It is a book of faces, wells, classrooms, fields and the daily walk for water that shaped everything the Foundation went on to build.

This archive brings that material back into public view: the origin story in Mwarusembe, the women who led the work in their own villages, the evolution from hand-dug wells to solar-powered water systems, and the supporters who joined along the way.

Everything here is historical — documented as it stood in 2016. Where the Foundation's work has moved on, we say so.

Inside the archive

From the photographic archive

  • A large group of women standing with water containers in front of an installed water tank in a Tanzanian village.
  • Women gathered together at a village meeting in Mkuranga.
  • Portrait of a woman in a green headscarf in Mkuranga, from The Village Heart photographic archive.
  • Portrait of a woman carrying a load on her head, in Mkuranga.
  • Portrait of an elderly woman in a blue and orange headscarf, in Mkuranga.
  • Portrait of a woman in a pink patterned headscarf, in Mkuranga.
See the full portrait series

The people in the book

Cover of The Village Heart, showing a large group of women and children from Mkuranga gathered together with Maryvonne Pool.

The publication

The Village Heart

A glimpse inside the villages of Tanzania and the impact of clean water.

A photographic record of African Reflections Foundation’s early work in rural Tanzania — the villages, the wells, and the women and children whose lives are bound up with access to clean water.

Maryvonne Pool · 2016 · 157 pages

Read the book

Then and now

The story did not stop in 2016

The archive records where the Foundation began. The programmes below are where that work stands today — the same villages, the same priorities, a great deal more experience.

Continue the story

The wells, classrooms and farms in these photographs were built by people who decided to help. The next chapter works the same way.

Explore our workSupport ARF