How do you study when there’s nothing to eat?

More than £1000 was raised to support education in South Sudan at a launch event for Elizabeth Hodgkin’s Letters from Isohe at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.

Donations and proceeds of sales from the book went to staff and students of St Augustine’s School in Isohe, where Liz Hodgkin taught for eighteen months. Letters from Isohe is available now in paperback and e-book format.

For the author, the launch was a milestone. In 2011, at the age of seventy, after a career as a human rights researcher in the Middle East and Africa, she 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 was already a success before the launch, selling three hundred copies in the first few weeks after publication. Liz Hodgkin’s clear-sighted 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 beyond, 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.