Gillian Gibbons sought a new challenge as a teacher in Sudan

LIVERPOOL, England — Gillian Gibbons was looking for adventure.

The 54-year-old teacher jailed in Sudan for insulting Islam when her pupils named a teddy bear Muhammad left her job as deputy head teacher at Liverpool's Dovecot Primary School in August in hopes of fulfilling a lifelong ambition to travel and work in Africa.

Her marriage of 32 years collapsed last Christmas — and it was time to take a risk.

Gibbons used her home page on the social networking Web site MySpace as a platform to launch her new single life.

"I like to make the most out of life," she wrote. "I love to travel (this is my passion) ... I hope to indulge my wanderlust from here, visiting Ethiopia and Uganda in the summer maybe and Jordan at Easter."

"She was a very adventurous person, who talked for years about teaching abroad and she loved Africa," Gill Langworthy, her friend and former colleague, told The Associated Press. "She said last week in an e-mail that she was having a wonderful time, enjoying the culture, how friendly it was and loving how different it was to Liverpool."

But the differences Gibbons championed had devastating repercussions for the committed educator, who was convicted Thursday of insulting Islam by repeating an exercise favored by teachers back home — using a teddy bear as a learning tool.

Her mistake was allowing the pupils to name the stuffed toy Muhammad. Giving the name of the Muslim prophet to an animal or a toy could be considered insulting.

"The lesson she was doing is very common practice with teachers in Britain, naming a teddy and get pupils to write a diary extract. We did it when she was at our school," said Langworthy, who taught with Gibbons at Garston Church of England Primary School between 1997-2000.

After being seized by Sudanese authorities on Sunday, Gibbons initially was denied contact with her children — John, 25, and Jessica, 27 — and ex-husband Peter, a head teacher in Liverpool, northern England.

But she spoke to her son by telephone on Friday and appealed for tolerance.

"She just doesn't want any resentment to Muslims," John Gibbons told The Associated Press outside his house in Liverpool. "She doesn't want people using her and her case as something to stoke up resentment towards anyone, towards Sudanese people, towards Muslim people or whatever.

"You know, that's not the type of person she is, that's not what she wants."