Regina's Memoir

Memoir of a Cocoa Farmer's Daughter

From Caribbean Rural Development Activist to Rural Entrepreneur

HONEST, COMPELLING AND ORIGINAL, this work describes the journey of Regina Dumas, a Caribbean woman whose life pilgrimage takes her to places and situations she never would have imagined. Desiring only to lead an independent if humdrum existence in her native Trinidad and Tobago, Regina, instead, finds herself at the age of 24, travelling to Jamaica, where she will spend three years while her husband pursues his academic career. She, meanwhile, immerses herself in a culture she finds delightfully bewitching while she struggles with the challenge of teaching the Spanish language to rural students whose Jamaican accent she can barely grasp.

At the end of three years, she is presented with yet another challenge– her husband wishes to pursue further studies in Geneva, Switzerland and refuses to go except accompanied by his wife and the baby they now have. Switzerland changes her entire perspective on life and when she returns to the Caribbean four years later, she is anxious to put into practice the rural development theory she has acquired in Geneva. And she does. With the unfortunate dissolution of her marriage in 1980 comes the opportunity to work in revolutionary Grenada for 4 years until the implosion occurs.

Sadly, she returns with her children to Trinidad where her dreams of pulling together the strands of her experiences are finally realized in rural Tobago on the cocoa estate owned by her family