SNEZ E-News : A boy named Poi

Poi

When we arrived on Green Gecko's doorstep, the first person we saw was a man with a huge smile, waving from the street. On orientation, Liz, the volunteer co-ordinator introduced us to this man named Poi. He lived in the house next to Green Gecko with his mum since he was born. Poi is a man of about mid 30's, it's hard to say how old really, but he has an intellectual mind of about 10 years old. Because of his disability and the way he looked physically, he had been ostracized from the local community. He's never been to school, he doesn't have a lot of life experience and has been neglected.

When Green Gecko Project arrived next door about 7 years ago. The crew saw this man peering through the fence every day, and when they saw him, he ran away. He was so frightened. He was welcomed into the Green  Gecko project, and over time became a little more social and now interacts with all the Green Gecko kids and sometimes stands at Tanya's window and stares for hours.

When we arrived, I gave him my video camera, and he became our official photographer while we were there. He soon started carrying our guitars to and from the music room. He would watch the boys during rehearsal practicing, and although he didn't understand english, and we did understand Khmer, he let us know that he wanted to play the guitar. So each afternoon we'd plug in the guitar, he'd have a strum and then he'd get so excited, he'd laugh from deep within his belly and run off with his arms waving in the air in excitment. It was wonderful to watch.
 



Now Poi, eats breakfast, lunch and dinner with the geckos, he gets taken to the doctor and the dentist regularly by the gecko project and is included as part of the family.

Anyway, my point is that this beautiful human being was overlooked, as many others are in Cambodia and other parts of the country and I just wanted to show you a little bit of video of Poi.