In her 70s, Elizabeth Hodgkin-a historian and human rights researcher-upped and left her village in England in 2011 to go and teach in South Sudan at a time when the country was ranked bottom in education and had just gained her independence.
She ended up spending two years teaching in a small village, Isohe, situated in a valley surrounded by mountains in South Sudan’s Eastern Equatoria State.
Isohe village has schools, a catholic parish, and a hospital, all set up and run by catholic entities under the auspices of the Catholic Diocese of Torit during the war before independence.
The valley was chosen to host the facilities by the late Auxiliary Bishop Johnson Akio Mutek because it was relatively safe from the tenacious aerial bombardment the Khartoum government used to inflict on areas controlled by the then rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) led by Dr. John Garang D Mabior. It was still bombed and the schools had to build trenches and bunkers.
Interestingly, the SPLM/A had in the late 1980s and early 1990s established and operated the Isohe Political School for its carders from the same location due to its perceived safety.
This is where the septuagenarian Elizabeth Hodgkin chose to come and help humanity.
For two years as a teacher in the Isohe, Elizabeth would often write to friends in England about her experience. 10 years later, a compilation of Elizabeth’s letters has been published under the title; ‘Letters from Isohe’.
When Radio Tamazuj caught up with her, she says she started writing sparsely but after three months decided to increase the frequency and number of people she wrote to.
“I was writing letters to people and after about three months I thought; ‘why should I write ten letters?’ I decided instead of writing 20 letters, I would write one letter to 20 or 30 people. So, I started to write these letters to friends and I would send them after every three months,” Elizabeth says.
“I was just writing to friends. I was speaking sort of jokingly a bit about my life and so naturally I was underlining what is different between the life in England and the life in Isohe,” she adds. “Before that, I lived in a small village in England so I was just writing so that friends would see what life was like in an African school. They were not supposed to be for history, they were just for friends.”
Elizabeth describes Isohe as a beautiful place with good people.
“Isohe is one of the most beautiful places in the world. I thought I was going to a difficult place and I came to this valley where there was a secondary school headed by Sister Paskwina Iromo with a thousand students-founded by the Comboni Fathers,” Elizabeth reminisces. “What other people do not see in South Sudan is the friendship and solidarity of a simple life with the joys we do not have so normally in Britain of spending your evening sitting around in a circle talking to each other.
“And there is also the beauty of the bush and mountains all around you and one could never get tired of looking at the mountains,” she adds.
However, Elizabeth concedes that the people of the picturesque Isohe valley faced lots of challenges and the children and youth strove to get a good education.
“People in school were facing so many difficulties of hunger, small conflicts, and lack of money and yet they fought through everything to get an education. You simply had to support them,” Elizabeth recounts.
In her letters back home, Elizabeth says she talked of many vital things like how a local women’s group intervened to keep the peace and how the students fought hard to get an education.
“I spoke a lot about the work done by women and how the parish priest aimed to make the women more important in the community. At the end of our time in school, I and the other women would get worried at the rate girls were dropping out of education,” she says.
Elizabeth says that the girl’s belief in education was so moving and that kept pushing her. She often quotes one girl who said: “My mother sent me to school. I do not have a father, brothers, or sisters. There is not even a good hospital, people are suffering and no boy from our village has finished school. I will be a doctor or a nurse.”
According to UNICEF, over 70 percent of children, are out of school in South Sudan, putting at risk their futures and the future of the country. The largest group of out-of-school children in South Sudan is girls. Poverty, child marriage, and cultural and religious views all hinder girls’ education.
According to the septuagenarian, in a poor country like South Sudan, it is difficult for teachers to survive on their salaries but, like others, they work for the good of all people.
“In a poor country, it is very difficult for a teacher to live on their salary. It is so difficult for people to live on normal salaries in South Sudan but some people are making a lot of money,” she laments. “How can one teach students who are poor to fight against corruption? In the end, we have to work for the good of all people and so I admire teachers who choose poverty and to help the students. I admire them enormously and I am sure there will be a better future.”
Elizabeth highlights some of the problems hindering boys and girls from going to school as pressure on boys to get into cattle raiding to get cattle for bride price, while girls are pressured into early marriages. She says it is the strength and character of some of the children which helps them resist the pressures.
She celebrates with pleasure as she mentions how some of their students became successful but still hopes that more opportunities will be made available for the youths.
“Ten years later, there have been about 7 or 8 of our students who are now doctors, midwives, nurses and that gives us a feeling of pleasure,” Elizabeth says. “But also, there are students who took useful subjects like accountancy and economics but have not found jobs and that puts me into some despair. Why are people trained to be useful citizens out of a job?”
“We have got to use the youths. The youth are wonderful and they believe in the future. They have to be used and given a life,” Elizabeth concluded.
