“My family is from a small, small country called Guyana,” Bomani said. “It's at the brim of South America, and even though we are part of Latin America, we mostly identify as Afro-Caribbean."

She’s celebrating her Caribbean heritage at an arts camp, where she’s contracted to help kids explore the region’s culture through dance. 

“Right now, I am teaching the children how to dance salsa, which is one of the most famous genres of Caribbean dance,” Bomani said.

Bomani serves Caribbean patients at a Cleveland hospital. When's she not practicing her profession, she provides low-cost Caribbean dance classes through her company Caribe Conexión Cle.

“Bend your knees and shimmy, now turn,” she said during a lesson.

Growing up in the inner city of Cleveland, Bomani said dance provided her a safe space.

 “I always knew that I didn't quite fit in with a lot of the other kids in Cleveland,” she said.

She said Caribbean dancing gave her an outlet to be herself when other types of dance did not.

“I started off in ballet, jazz, tap, and I never saw myself represented in those spaces," she said. "I was always told because of my skin tone, because of my height, I’m short, and because I weighed a little bit more that I would never be a dancer."

The doctor added that she learned the region’s different dance styles on YouTube with her cousin.

“We just looked up different dances from all around the diaspora, and we started learning from there," Bomani said. "Since then, my journeys have taken me to almost every country in the Caribbean, trying to learn what dances are native to each different country and teaching it to the Cleveland massive."

This Caribbean-American Heritage Month, she said she’s also excited to connect her son to her culture through dance. He just started walking.

“We come from such a rich history and I want him to be proud of where he comes from, where my family come [sic] from, came from, and what my ancestors have gone through in order to make it over to the new world,” she said.