At a launch event in March at SOAS (the School of Oriental and African Studies at London University) for Elizabeth Hodgkin’s Letters from Isohe £1000-plus was raised for education in South Sudan. Donations and proceeds of sales went to Opportunity Through Education (UK registered charity 1179046) to assist staff and students of St Augustine’s School in Isohe where Liz taught for eighteen months. The book is available now in paperback and e-book format.
The launch was a milestone for the author. In 2011, at the age of seventy, after a career as a human rights researcher in the Middle East and Africa, Liz Hodgkin went to teach in Isohe, in a remote mountainous area of Eastern Equatoria, in South Sudan. There she joined South Sudanese colleagues in the struggle to rebuild their communities after decades of war, teaching in a secondary school that lacked books and classrooms, where malaria and unreliable food supplies were everyday challenges.
Letters from Isohe is a collection of the letters home that Liz wrote to friends. The book has been a success even before it was launched, selling several hundred copies in the first few weeks. Liz’s clear-sighted, compassionate and humorous account of life at St Augustine’s School in Isohe strikes a chord with all who read it. Praised in South Sudan and worldwide, the book echoes with the voices of teachers, school-students, mothers, nuns and priests as they laugh, argue and discuss everyday life – elopements, pregnancies, hunger, guns, rain, cattle raids and local politics – and reflect on their future in a fractured nation.
cityofwords.net 