Poipu Kauai Vacation Rentals and Honeymoon Cottages

Poipu Beach Kauai Ocean View Rental Home and Cottages

About Us

Aloha!

I'm Summer Harrison, the owner of Hale Pohaku. I'm the voice on the other end of the phone when you call for reservations, so I thought I'd take a few moments to introduce myself.

I've been living on Kauai since 1989. After coming here on business trips twice, and vacations two more times after that, I finally just decided to make the move. The last time I was here on vacation, I managed to put 1200 miles on the rental car in ten days (if you've been to Kauai, you know how hard that is!), went home, gave notice at my job in Washington, D.C., packed up my things, put them in the basement, got friends to promise to mail them to me as soon as I found a place to live, and two months later I was back on Kauai. It was essentially starting life over at the age of 35, and I've never regretted it for an instant.

The defining element of my life is my daughter Hannah. I adopted her from Cambodia in 2000, when she was six months old. After having received numerous written reports from the adoption agency telling me she was a normal, healthy baby, you can only imagine what I went through when, two months after bringing her home, I was told that her brain damage was so severe it was possible she'd never develop beyond the level of a two month old infant.

After years of medical testing and trips to specialists on the mainland (including Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, Stanford University's children's hospital and more recently UCLA Medical Center), I know that she suffered a stroke before she was born. Hannah's list of diagnoses include microcephaly (an abnormally small brain), blindness (she has limited occasional vision, as the source of the problem is the destruction of the brain tissue, not her eyes themselves), cerebral palsy, and uncontrollable seizures (she has subclinical seizure activity in her brain every one to two seconds). She has severe cognitive impairment and global developmental delays, so that she cannot take food by mouth but feeds through a tube that was surgically implanted in her tummy.

With lots of love, therapy and medical treatments, she is doing so much better than the doctors ever predicted. On Mother's Day of 2004, she began walking. Her physical and visual therapists say she has an incredible "mental mapping" capability, so that she has learned how to navigate herself through the house. I've color coded the walls so she can tell when she goes from one room into another (the only vision she has is peripheral), and everyone makes sure we keep her paths clear of obstructions. She is still considered medically fragile, but is now learning how to use a touch screen computer to play games and, eventually, communicate.

Managing Hale Pohaku by phone and email allows me to stay home with Hannah. It can also mean that there are times that I'm not able to return phone calls as quickly as I would like, for which I apologize in advance. I have two incredible people working for me to help with Hale Pohaku, Leah Alaibilla and her husband Keli. When you make a reservation with us, you'll get an email with their cell phone numbers as well, so that you can always contact somebody immediately if you need to.

In my spare time, I breed Australian multigenerational labradoodles for service dogs. I'm the official breeding program for the only certified service dog trainer in Hawaii who will train dogs for children. If you'd like to read more about this, feel free to visit my other web site for Paradise Labradoodles

Thank you for visiting our web site. I look forward to meeting you!

To reserve one or more cottages call 1-866-742-6462

For a map to our property click here