Des Moines Register

A few weeks back I was interviewed via telephone by Kristin, a newspaper reporter for the Des Moines Register. Kristin was interested in doing an article about me and my studies abroad. On August 3^rd 2011, this is what was published in the Des Moines Register.

WDM man sees a country born

A West Des Moines resident is studying and volunteering in the Sudan this summer.

George Cole-Duvall, 19, is getting a first-person view as citizens there celebrate the independence of the Republic of South Sudan. The experience also allows him to jump-start his political science studies at the University of Northern Iowa.

George is studying Arabic and teaches English to adults. He is also visiting local churches with Rt. Rev. Samuel Enosa Peni, a family friend.

"It was amazing to be in the country that on day one was enslaved and the next day free. The desire to be free is a universal feeling - no one wants to be enslaved by other people," George said by phone from South Sudan. "Though the day of freedom did not mark a difference in the quality of life, it did mark a sense of joy for a new beginning."

His parents, Rev. Canon Mary Cole-Duvall, rector of St. Timothy's Episcopal Church in West Des Moines, and Rev. Canon H. Milton Cole-Duvall, assisting priest at St. Timothy's, had met Peni three years ago when Peni was a student at Wartburg Theological Seminary in Waverly.

Peni had interned with Mary, developing a position paper on how the church could be an agent for peace in war-torn Sudan. He invited George to visit him in Sudan.

Milton later attended the consecration of Peni in 2009 at All Saints Cathedral in Nzara, Sudan, and St. Timothy's parish raised more than $6,000 to purchase approximately 50 bicycles for clergy in Sudan. It didn't take long for George to decide to go to Sudan.

George graduated from Valley High School in the spring. He was accepted to the University of Northern Iowa and contemplated studying abroad.

"His mom asked if he wanted to go on to college or take a year off. His initial reaction was not to travel, then said he's interested in public service. He also talked about going to law school, and there's a foreign service school at Georgetown," Milton said.

"He pondered what to do and asked about President Obama performing public service. Then George talked to a woman at Northern Iowa and asked her if she had the option of going to college or going overseas when a new country came into existence, what would she do.

"She said you could go to college at any time, but you couldn't be in many countries like that. Then we talked to another woman about studying abroad who referred us to two professors who carved an hour out of their full schedules to talk with George and make it possible."

After finishing high school a month early, George traveled to New York to perform with his high school jazz orchestra at Lincoln Center, then hopped on a plane and headed to Uganda and on to Sudan.

"He had never flown by himself, let alone overseas, and there was a terrorist scare on the airplane, which fortunately turned out not to be true," Milton said. "He traveled 20 hours to Uganda, spent five days there and then headed to the Sudan."

George presented Peni with $3,535 he received as high school graduation gifts that would help pay the preschool tuition of 101 local children.

He also donated more than $1,000 he had received for his birthday last August for their tuition.

After making friends there, he decided to ask his parents to skip purchasing his birthday gifts this year - he shares an August birthday with President Obama - and instead pay for the two friends' bus transportation to seminary in Kenya.

"He said, 'Dad, I don't need anything for my birthday. There are kids eating beans and rice. There's a hole in the ground that's the toilet. I don't need anything," Milton related. George Cole-Duvall also told his father that his two best friends had both received scholarships to go to seminary school in Kenya, but they had no money for transportation. His father and mother gave the two friends the $500 they needed. "George said it was the best birthday present ever," added his father. George spends his days enhancing his speaking of the Zandi tribal language, studying Arabic and teaching English. Peni has commissioned him as The Diocese of Nzara Youth Missionary. He teaches keyboard and trumpet to others and is teaching himself the guitar.

For his coursework, George has interviewed newly elected and appointed government leaders for The Western Equatorial State and the Republic of South Sudan. He marched with tens of thousands of locals and played his trumpet in the celebration July 9 when the Republic of South Sudan became its own country.

George will be oversees through May 2012. He will travel to Rwanda and explore the 1990s genocide there, which might open the door to an internship at the United Nations Genocide Investigative Unit in which he's interested.

"I hope to become more aware of our worldwide community and take that knowledge and share it with the people of the U.S. Only when people meet and know each other do they then realize the universality of humanity that binds us all together," he said.