Parents praise Broseley locals for rallying round to save their four-year-old son battling cancer
When Zachariah was diagnosed with an incredibly rare form of leukaemia, his family found phenomenal support from their community
HANNAH Oliver-Willetts was sitting in her parked car, talking on the phone, when a woman rapped on the window.
As she wound it down, a handful of change was thrust at her.
“I wanted to give you whatever was in my purse,” said the stranger. “It’s for Zac.” This was not an unusual occurrence.
During the past four weeks, friends, neighbours, acquaintances and strangers have been clamouring to give Hannah cash to fund potentially life-saving treatment for her four-year-old son.
Zachariah was diagnosed with a form of leukaemia called Near Haploid, which is so rare it is thought he is the only person with the condition in the UK and just one of six in the world.
His family are pinning their hopes on raising £500,000 to fund pioneering CAR T-cell therapy at the Children’s Hospital Of Philadelphia in the US. The treatment has recently been licensed for use in the UK, but strict medical criteria means Zac is not eligible.
Currently, Zac’s prognosis is very poor. But the success rate at the world-renowned American hospital is between 60 and 80 per cent.
Hannah said: “It means there’s a chance Zac could be cured for Christmas.”
The smiling, dinosaur-loving youngster has inspired an extraordinary show of community spirit, stretching not only through his home town of Broseley, Shrops, but across the whole county. Within four weeks, kind-hearted individuals, clubs, schools and businesses have raised £330,000.
Zac’s uncle Wayne Bowen swam a mile in a canal, pulling Zac behind him in a canoe. Jeanette Stringer, 74, will be dressing up as a dinosaur and completing her first zip wire.
Local lad Finnley Wiggan, 13, was prepared to part with a signed Arsenal shirt until the buyer discovered where the proceeds were going and decided to let him keep the top — while donating £150 to the fund.
There was a Scout group who shunned their tuck shop and gave their pennies to a collection and the family who asked for donations from a loved-one’s funeral to go to Zac.
Not to mention everything from Guess The Weight Of The Cabbage to a fishing contest, bake sales, martial arts kick-athons and so many more inventive ways of raising money. The catalogue of generosity is far too big to list.
This weekend, there’s a fashion show and a “Zac Fest” in Telford Town Park on Sunday, with live music headlined by Britain’s Got Talent group Escala and a funfair. There’s also an attempt to break the world record for singing in relay.
Occupational therapist Hannah, 33, said: “I bumped into a woman in the BP garage one day and had a quick chat about Zac. The next time I saw her, she gave me £700.
She had sold homemade bangles and asked everyone she knew to donate.
“The support has been phenomenal — just gobsmacking. It has snowballed so quickly.
“It’s magical, really, to think so many people want to help.”
You can help too
ZAC still needs £170,000 to hit the £500,000 fund-raising target. Here’s how you can help:
ONLINE: .
BY TEXT: Send ‘ZACH75 £’ (then the amount of donation in numbers) to 70070.
Learn more at .
The community spirit has even extended to providing Zac’s family, his mum, stepdad Wayne Willets, 37, a plasterer, and little brother Leo, three, with a hot meal every night.
Zac’s gran Annette Oliver, 62, a former special needs teacher, said: “There’s a rota of 17 people and they take it in turns to make a hot meal for the family. It gets delivered by a friend’s husband every night at 7pm.
“It’s such an incredible gesture. It means Hannah doesn’t have to go shopping or think about meal times, so she can focus on Zac’s care and the fundraising.
“She has become an expert nurse, administering Zac’s medication, checking his tubes overnight and taking him to hospital.”
Zac’s name and face are everywhere in Broseley and nearby Telford. Shropshire council has even named a road gritter after him, which he posed in yesterday.
Annette said: “I was in the bank the other day and I was the worst person you want to get stuck behind.
“I was counting out donations in coins and I had two excitable grandsons running around the place.
“If this happened any other time, you would expect people in the queue to be tutting and getting annoyed. But they weren’t because they all know Zac and they knew why I was there counting out my coins. Everyone is rooting for him.”
It’s a race against time for Zac, who needs to be in Philadelphia by mid-November to have the best chance of the cell therapy working.
He needs to still be in good health for the treatment to go ahead, so the family constantly fear he will have a relapse before he gets there. And Hannah admits she initially feared raising the money in time would be impossible.
She said: “If I’m honest, the amount we needed to raise seemed unachievable at first.
“But I knew I had to try because I didn’t want to have any regrets. I had to know I’d done everything I could as a mother to protect and provide for my children.
FUN-D raising heroes
The people of Shropshire have gone to great – and inventive – lengths to raise money for Zac. Here are just some of the ways they have rallied around the youngster.
- Staff and kids in 161 firms and 81 schools wore Red For Zac on September 28, with each person paying at least £1 to take part.
- Local JBS Martial Arts Academy ran a kick-athon, above, and raised £1,000.
- One woman is shaving her head, a man has waxed his back and chest, and some brave men are dyeing their armpit hair red.
- Zac’s uncle Wayne, below. swam a mile in a canal, pulling Zac behind in a canoe.
- One man decided to chip in £5 every time he got up to use the loo one night – he went four times.
- Tattooist Jessica Vanitas is taking no fee for red heart inkings, with all proceeds going to Zac. She has raised around £400 so far.
- TFM Farm Supplies put a swear box in their office and raised £100 in a week.
- Local gran Anne Suffolk, 70, above, will do a sponsored 16-mile hike over The Wrekin hill tomorrow.
- A team from the Telford Whitehouse Hotel cycled 3,479 miles – the distance from Telford to Philadelphia – on an exercise bike. They raised more than £600.
“But now I do believe we can do it. We just need one final push.”
Celebrities have also rallied to the cause, including TV presenter Jonathan Ross, Dire Straits frontman Mark Knopfler and England player Jermain Defoe.
The striker shared a video about Zac with his 982,000 Twitter followers on September 28, the same day 81 schools and 160 businesses in Shropshire wore red for Zac as part of the drive to raise funds.
Donations to the family’s Just Giving site, which is run by Zac’s dad Mark Garbett, have come in from as far afield as New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, America and Australia. Zac is, of course, pretty much oblivious to the frenzy.
Hannah said: “On the Wear Red For Zac day, he did ask why his picture was everywhere we went and why everyone was wearing red.
“It was an absolutely incredible sight. We walked through our town and every single person we saw was in red, and people had put red in their windows and the shop windows on the High Street.
“I told him it was for him. Sometimes he asks if everyone will wear red again for him.”
The family got the devastating news that their fun-loving boy had blood cancer on May 18.
A pain in Zac’s arm was the first sign something was wrong. It was assumed he had broken it and he was given a plaster cast.
Two days later, he complained of a pain in his knee, and his mobility decreased until he was unable to walk the following morning.
Hannah said: “Getting the diagnosis was absolutely devastating. Horrendous. It felt like dropping a glass on to the floor and it shattering into a thousand pieces. I couldn’t use the word cancer in the same sentence as my son’s name for a long time. What parent would want to?”
Four days after his diagnosis, Zac started chemotherapy.
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He has good days and bad days; days when he spends his head over the toilet and cannot eat, and days when he finds the energy to roll around on the floor with brother Leo. He still revels in listing off the Latin names of favourite dinosaurs.
Hannah said: “Zac is a normal four-year-old.
“Before he became ill, he was a 100mph little boy, always running and jumping and climbing.
“He loves cooking with me, and playing with his little brother. He’s a very happy, kind and loving boy. If he relapses, he may not pull through. We are not prepared to wait for him to relapse.”
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