Our founder
From Gasundwe, for Gasundwe
The story of Knowing God Missions begins on a dirt path in a remote village in the hills of Rwanda — an hour’s walk from the nearest school.
The boy who walked to school
Fidele Bolton was born in 1974 in Gasundwe, a small, remote village in Rwanda, where he grew up with his seven brothers and sisters in the safety of family and village life. Like every child in the surrounding hills, he walked more than an hour each way to ‘Viro’ Primary School. He kept walking: to secondary boarding school, where he studied biochemistry, and on to university at the Kigali Institute of Science and Technology.
In 2002, Fidele moved to the United Kingdom to study at Mattersey Hall Bible College, graduating in 2006 with a Bachelor’s degree in theology and biblical studies from Bangor University in Wales. He was ordained as a minister with the British Assemblies of God and served as a pastor in Rochdale, near Manchester — first as associate pastor of Hebron Church (2006–2012), then in the town’s shared life: the leadership team of Rochdale Churches Together, Rochdale Town Centre chaplain, and chaplain of St Anne’s Academy in Manchester.
The visit that changed everything
After nearly a decade in England, Fidele made his first journey home to Gasundwe. Standing again among the people he had grown up with — seeing both their faith and their need — he could not simply return to life as it was. That visit gave birth to the Rochdale to Rwanda project, the seed of everything that followed.
At the end of 2011, Fidele moved to Canada and began gathering a team in the capital region. The project became Ottawa 2 Rwanda, a registered Canadian charity — and as the work grew beyond one city into teaching, scholarships, and food relief, it took the name it carries today: Knowing God Missions, in Kinyarwanda Tumenyimana.
Why help students from low-income families go to school? Why give someone a meal at Christmas? Because we love them — and we love them because God loves them.The conviction at the heart of KGM
Fidele lives in the Ottawa–Gatineau region with his wife Claire and their children. He leads Knowing God Missions as a volunteer, teaches the Bible daily through WhatsApp in the languages of East Africa, and is an ordained pastor available to preach and speak in Canadian churches on behalf of the mission.
His story is the mission’s story: Rwanda is not a project to him. It is home. When you partner with KGM, you are standing behind a son of the village, serving his own people in the name of Jesus.