Today:  After completing my Ph.D. in December 1998, I decided not to return to North America, not to pursue a tenure-track professor position.  Instead, I am staying on here in the Dominican Republic as a permanent resident—it’s kind of a life-long continuing field study.  I feel more “at home” here than I ever did in Canada, the U.S., Mexico, Europe, or other Caribbean countries.  Dominicans are such a genuinely warm and loving people.  They have adopted me and vice versa.  Here, I am involved in a number of different but related projects, which include:

--Co-Founder and Director of STUDENT & RESEARCHER SERVICES—Santo Domingo.  To date, Severino Polanco and I have worked with student groups from Vanderbilt University, Western Michigan University, Michigan State University, Central Michigan University, Cornell University, Fisk University, Ithaca College, the University of Rhode Island, Millikin University, DePauw University, COUNSEL and FLASCO university consortiums, and Putney Student Travel.  We also have worked with individual students and researchers from the U.S., Canada, England, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, France, Italy, Germany, Austria, Japan, Spain, Brazil and other Latin American and Caribbean countries, and with various church-related and project-oriented youth groups who have come to the Dominican Republic.  We are the unofficial guides and on-site orientators for staff, family visitors, and VIP guests of the U.S., Canadian, and British Embassies, and have run intercultural exchange programs for the Dominican Secretaria del Estado de Turismo’s tourist police.  In the summer of 2003 we will be inaugurating our program ¡Espanol en la Playa!

--Professor of History, Literature, and Geography (formerly professor of English as a Second Language and Spanish as a Second Language) for The American School of Santo Domingo, Arroyo Hondo. 

--Private editor and translator (English and Spanish).

--Faculty member and on-site expeditor for the World Classroom’s “Discover a New World,” an interactive Internet program in both English and Spanish aimed at educating junior-high-school students about the Dominican Republic.  The program uses live video and stills from current and on-going archaeological excavations to give participants a “you are there” feel and insight into the latest breaking archaeological finds on an island that is full of them.  The program also provides an exciting variety of educational information on Dominican history and culture, and on the island’s colorful flora and fauna, both on land and in the sea.  Each week there are live “chats” with experts in various fields.  www.cyberdig.com

--Co-founder and co-director of the Caribbean Amerindian Centrelink website and an editor for their new electronic journal Kacike (premiere issue debuted January 2000).  www.kacike.org

--Master of Ceremonies for the Show Folklórico Dominicano, a colorful presentation that brings alive the country’s musical and dance traditions in a unique location, the Guácara Taína, a discotheque in a huge underground cavern beneath Santo Domingo’s Parque Mirador del Sur.  The Grupo Folklórico Dominicano is an award-winning ballet troupe under the direction of Prof. José Castillo of the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo and Indefolk, the cultural center dedicated to the memory of the island’s most famous Afro-Dominican scholar, Fradique Lizardo.

--Associate Researcher, Archivo Histórico de Santiago.

--Freelance writer.  Write articles about the Taínos, and Dominican history and culture for general magazines and professional journals.  Also, am writing the first of a trilogy of historical-fiction novels about the island and its people, La Cacica Anacaona.  Anacaona was the sister of the most powerful of the Taínos’ five supreme caciques when the Spaniards arrived in 1492 and the wife of the second most powerful cacique.  When both her brother and her husband died, she became the island’s most powerful and most respected indigenous leader.  She most likely had an affair with Columbus’s brother Bartolomé, founder of the city of Santo Domingo, and gave birth to his mestizo child.  The crown replaced the Columbus brothers with Governor Nicolás de Ovando in 1502 with the orders “to pacify” the Taínos, which he did by assassinating all the island’s powerful caciques, their families and counselors, including Anacaona, whom he had hanged in Santo Domingo.... The second novel will be about that mestizo child, the son of Anacaona and Bartolomé Columbus, and Enriquillo, the Taíno hero who led a successful rebellion against the Spaniards from 1514-1533.  The third will be the story of Sebastián Lemba, the first African rebel slave leader whom we know by name.