Gillian Gibbons is off to China - and teddy is going too!

Jan 2 2008 by Aaron Boland, Liverpool Daily Post

Gillian Gibbons

TEDDY bear row teacher Gillian Gibbons is hoping to get a new teaching job in China – and will take her teddy bear with her.

Mrs Gibbons, 54, from Aigburth, who was jailed in Sudan for insulting Islam when she allowed her pupils to name a teddy Mohammed, told a magazine she hopes nobody there will have heard of her.

She said she would not be stopped from taking her teddy bear with her on her first day at a Chinese school.

And she revealed it was the death of her brother, Stephen, just before Easter last year, that made her realise she must live life to the full and travel abroad.

The former Dovecot Primary School teacher said: “I’ve been to China on holiday before and loved it. I know I’m the most notorious teacher in the world at the moment, but I’m hoping perhaps no one has heard of me there.”

The divorced mother-of-two was spared a flogging, but sentenced to 15 days in jail.

After eight days, she was pardoned when two British Muslim peers flew to the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, to champion her cause.

She said that from being a teenager she knew she did not want to wake up at 60 and regret missed opportunities.

Losing her brother to cancer at 56 had given her the strength to follow her dream to teach abroad, just as he had always dreamed of doing.

She said: “Just before Christmas in 2006, I told him I had been offered a job in Sudan. Although he knew his cancer had returned, he put off telling me the bad news until I accepted the post. He is the one who persuaded me to go.”

It was her brother’s memory that helped her through prison: “I knew I had to be brave.”

“When I thought about Stephen and how brave he’d been in the face of death, I realised I could be brave, too.”

carolineinnes