Norma Proudfoot

Norma Proudfoot (1926 to 2015), raised on a mixed farm in northwestern Alberta’s “Peace River Country”, was a school teacher, wife, mother of seven children, world-traveler, creative writer, and painter. After obtaining her B.Ed. degree from the University of Alberta in 1948, Norma taught school at Nampa, and later, at Fulton Place Elementary School in Edmonton. Norma mentored young Zambian mothers through the Zambia YWCA during the early 1970s – when she penned Amateurs on Safari about her family’s epic travels in East Africa – and was later a volunteer teacher in both Ecuador and Tanzania during husband Robert Sr.’s technical education consulting abroad in the 1980s. In addition to her poignant essays (on changing agriculture, immigration, urban poverty, and pleasant interactions with wildlife); biographies of her brother and PEI ancestors; a short story on family dynamics; and African Memories painting depicted in son Robert’s 2019 book Enduring Art, Active Faith – 3 Generations Create!, Norma self-published her autobiography Roses on Our Trap-door in the mid-1990s, and co-edited First Presbyterian Church: A History, written in 2004 by Dr. Kenneth Munro. Norma passed away in 2015, but her love and skill of creative storytelling lives on; she also taught and shaped many children both in church and public schools, to participate well in life.