Retired Jasper couple Jill and Neil Fenton don’t do “retired.” 

When they left Jasper in 1999 after working as the principals of the Jasper Primary and High School, for their “retirement” they spent most of the next ten years helping build one of the most prestigious schools in all of Rwanda. At 66 and 72 years old, they’ve now “retired” again, this time from the Kigali-based school and are now turning their attention to aiding the entire schooling system in all of Rwanda.

“My only regret is that we didn’t do this ten years ago,” said Jill Fenton about her time teaching and running the Green Hills Academy from 1999 until 2009 in Kigali, Rwanda. She called it one of the most rewarding periods of her entire life.

“You just do the work. It’s that simple,” she said. “People would ask us ‘What do you do after five (p.m.)?” and we would say ‘Sleep!’ My feet were so tired somedays, but you just got on with it.”

Jill Fenton speaks fondly of the earliest days of the Green Hills Academy in 1999 when she and her husband first arrived in Africa. While the Green Hills Academy had concrete walls and paved lots (it was a far cry from the images of mud huts that some minds conjure when thinking about school outside of African city centres), electricity and tap water was intermittent and textbooks, papers, pens, were nearly non-existent. The roads to the school were “dreadful,” said Fenton. Some of the other ten Rwandan teachers had trouble speaking English and had little formal training in teaching. It was tough sledding.

“We didn’t have textbooks at the school so Neil and I and anyone else we could convince carried a lot of books in our luggage,” said Fenton.

Fenton remembers her New Years Eve in 1999 when some administration work was required at the school. She made plans to ring in the new millennium doing paper work. While at the school’s office, she went to use the schools photocopying machine (a cumbersome, large portable desktop unit that the Fenton’s used to load and unload around the countryside). The machine jammed. A friend went to check the problem and pulled out what appeared to be large piece of gray felt. Upon closer inspection, the grey matter was not felt at all. It was part of a rat. Rats had made a home in the machine.

“Welcome to the new millennium,” said Fenton ironically when recalling the night in school.

While there was joy in that moment, there was horror in others. The legacy of the Rwandan genocide in 1994, where more than 800,000 people were butchered, sometimes loomed. Teachers Fenton worked with spoke of fleeing  murderers by hiding under cows and bananas. 5,000 people were killed in a church near the Green Hills Academy. One woman told Fenton that she knew only how to express two emotions: laughter and tears.

“Most people are so busy just trying to live on a day to day basis to think about it a lot. It’s one of the poorest countries in all of Africa,” said Fenton. “People are just trying to put it behind them.”

Still, the school brought in the only mental health nurse in the entire country to help students. Teams of men and women found guilty of partaking in the genocide could be seen clearing brush and building cobblestone roads around the country.

After the horror of the 1990s, Fenton believes that she has spent the last ten years in Rwanda building the best school in the entire country. Fees there are higher than the average school in Rwanda, she said, but so is the quality of education, which is set to international standards. She said that she doesn’t believe that the school is only for elites and she hates the snobbish tag, but she admits that 99 per cent of the people who live in Rwanda can’t afford to go to Green Hills Academy. Even with its not for profit status and the scholarships that the school provides for a handful of students who would otherwise be too poor to attend, the school is simply out of reach for most Rwandans.

Fenton justifies the school’s status by saying that after the Rwandan genocide, many of the countries wealthiest, smartest, most powerful people fled and feared returning. While the country was suffering from loss of so many murdered people, it was also suffering the loss of people who simply did not want to live in Rwanda anymore. In plain terms, it was a brain drain motivated by fear and shock, but also by an inability to answer questions like “How does a country that loses 20 per cent of it’s population over the course of 100 days continue to operate?” Fenton believes that bringing the countries best and brightest back from life outside the aftermath of the genocide would require some coaxing.

“We wanted to provide a school with international standards so that Rwandans would come home to a place where they could provide their children with good, quality educations,” said Fenton.

She thinks the school has been successful. The school teaches from nursery school to Grade 12 at standards set by the Cambridge University International Centre, it is an International Baccalaureate World School and is also the first school in East Africa to become a Pasche Centre for German Language through the Goethe Institute.

“I believe that our school will produce the next president of the country,” said Fenton. “He, or she for that matter, will be from our school.

“The school has got money now. Things are much better.”

In 2009, after ten years of teaching and running the school and expanding its size from 200 students to 1,500 (and more than doubling the teaching staff), of molding by hand bricks that were used in school expansions  and of having the honour of watching one of her former students graduate and go on to Harvard, Jill and Neil Fenton’s days of serving Rwanda’s Green Hills Academy in an official capacity are now over. Green Hills Academy is now being run by a retired school administrator from Calgary who Fenton has the utmost faith in. She believes the school will continue to grow and succeed.

Since leaving Green Hills Academy, Fenton has found a new way of working, also in Rwanda. In conjunction with the Jasper, Kigali and Virunga Rotary Clubs, she and her husband are helping to organize Tools for Schools, a Canadian charity. If the aim of Green Hills Academy was to entice the elite parents of Rwanda to return home for the education of their children, than the focus of Tools for Schools is to help children who are not part of the elite. 

“Now we’re going really to focus on the poorer children,” said Fenton.

Many of the children who will receive aid do not even have parents and are orphans.

Vincent Murenzi, 18, is one of the Rwandans the program is helping. Murenzi is the eldest in his family of eight brothers, sisters and cousins. Both his parents were killed in the Rwandan genocide. He works as a security guard and is paid $30 a month. On that, he supports eight children and himself. It’s not enough to cover the fees for them to go to school, so Tools for Schools will help him pay. His extended family is able to go to school. 

The program will also organize workshops for teachers who will work at schools around Rwanda. There will also be organized efforts to develop local sources for supplies; individual chalkboards are proving to be a very handy invention, said Fenton. Uniforms will also be paid for and desks, chairs and other school infrastructure will be sought out. 

“In all aspects of the project, the emphasis is to build capacity in the country — to leave trained and equipped teachers, not to simply provide “hand-outs” and depart,” reads a mission statement for Tools for Schools.

“Any help we can get is appreciated. It’s very important work,” said Fenton.

Jill and Neil are currently back in Jasper organizing from here efforts for Tools for Schools. Sometime in September or October, they’ll be going back to Rwanda to continue the school work.

“We just love it. There’s no secret. It’s wonderful work,” said Fenton.