Jill Fenton arrived in Cremona, Alta., a village in Mountain View County, in 1969, wearing a mini skirt. It was January and temperature was hovering around -30 C. She was a new teacher from the British Channel Islands off the coast of northern France. She’d recently completed a two-year teaching stint in Ghana, and found her next job in Canada.
The frosty reception wasn’t enough to send her packing. “I was committed.”
That story is a neat illustration of a pattern in Fenton’s life: adapt to opportunity in unlikely places and jump whole-heartedly into the experience.
She met and married Neil Fenton the year she arrived, sealing her ties to Canada, and the newlyweds mulled over locations for their next move. Neil secured a teaching job in Jasper and Jill was hired in the district six months later. The proceeding decades were busy, raising four kids and becoming principals at different schools.
Fenton grew her career, writing textbooks and supervising practicum students from the University of Alberta. She and Neil built a happy home, entrenched in their community. They retired in 1999, but Fenton, in her 50s, didn’t feel done with working. One day, her phone rang. It was an old friend from her days in West Africa. A school in Rwanda was looking for a principal.
The couple arrived at Green Hills Academy in Kigali, the capital, to find 196 students, ranging in age from preschool to Grade 9. A non-profit, the school’s goal was to allow Rwandan students to study at home and learn English rather than attending boarding school.
Rwanda at the time was still picking up the pieces; just four years earlier it had experienced a genocide in which nearly a million Tutsi ethnic minority were murdered over 100 days.
“A lot of children had missed years of school as refugees,” Fenton says. “Their lives had been disrupted.”
The Fentons worked long hours alongside the school administration and teachers, growing the facility to offer programming through Grade 12 for 1,300 students, and an International Baccalaureate program.
Every year, the couple travelled to Jasper to maintain connections to family and community. In 2008, Neil began showing early signs of dementia, so they stepped away from Green Hills Academy and looked for other opportunities. On one trip home, friends who were inspired by their work offered funds for the Fentons to continue supporting education, this time in rural Rwanda.
That’s how Fenton came up with the idea for her non-profit, Tools for Schools, and the Rotary Club in Jasper donated, too. Starting in 2009, she travelled to rural locations and, in concert with Rwandan colleagues, helped build and equip 13 classrooms for preschool students, trained 1,470 teachers, designed and stocked nine libraries, and built three playgrounds. In 2019, Neil moved to a care facility in Canada, and he died in 2021.
Fenton returned to Rwanda by herself for a time, getting stuck in the country during the pandemic. She came back to Alberta for good in 2022.
Fenton stays abreast of her Kigali life, hearing about innovations underway that are characteristic of her friends there. The remote schools, for example, now have electricity and composting toilets that create methane gas that can be used as fuel. It’s the kind of adaptability she appreciated in Rwanda.
Her own adaptability has stood her in good stead. She was settling into life in Jasper when, in 2024, wildfires hit. With 15 minutes’ notice, she escaped with her daughter, her granddaughter who was visiting from England, their go-bags — and a mobility scooter that Fenton’s daughter uses due to Muscular Dystrophy, disassembling it for travel as fast as they could.
“It took us an hour to get out of the back alley and three hours to get out of town,” she remembers. “Twenty-five thousand people and no one misbehaved. It was like a string of Christmas lights.” But their house burned to the ground.
Fenton settled in a high rise on the edge of downtown Edmonton and sold her car so she could walk or take rideshares. She got a little dog that has been a conduit to meeting new friends and building community. She doesn’t lament the items she’s lost; she says she still has the memories. “I was telling my son, ‘I quite like it here,’” she says.
“Don’t tell me after all this work you’re not going to move back!” her son replied. He has been helping her oversee the rebuild of her Jasper house from his home in England. But Fenton is doing as she’s always done: adapting to the moment and living in it.
“I want a job,” she says. “When I get back to Jasper I’ll look around for something to do.”
This article appears in the June 2026 issue of Edify
