Waimea Weekly
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Wednesday 31 May 2023
Rock legend mentors musos Page 11
Maia hits new heights Page 24
PAGE 20-21
Community unite after system ‘failure’
JO KENT
A local mum who repeatedly asked for medical care has died just six days after being diagnosed with inoperable bowel cancer, her friends say. Friends of 41-year-old Emma Ey-
les, who grew up in Tasman before moving to Christchurch in 2021, are now rallying round to raise vital funds to support her 10-year-old daughter, Monroe. Close friend Shelley Sims, who owns Freshbake in Brightwater, says Monroe now faces the rest of
her life without her mother, who she says was a beautiful soul and had a passion for horses. “I’ve known Emma for eight years and as soon as I heard her diagnosis, I knew I had to help. Emma was terribly let down by the health care system and an in-
vestigation should be launched. “How classic symptoms of bowel cancer were overlooked so many times is a tragedy and lessons need to be learnt.” With a small army of volunteers and an outpouring of generosity from the community, Shelley
A man of many teapots
baked and sold around 6000 cupcakes over the weekend, raising $5000 for the family. “Emma would have been blown away to see the amount of people coming in to buy one $6 box of
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Kevin Wilson is still collecting teapots. Photo: Anne Hardie.
ANNE HARDIE Kevin Wilson is a “collector at heart” and at 83 has had some time to collect a few things, including more than 100 teapots that are scattered around his garden, house and every nook and cranny of his Richmond property. In the past he even bought them to fill the shelves of a friend’s tearooms in Westport that ended up with 400 teapots and became a sideline for the business. “They had all this room in the shop so I decided to fill the shelves with teapots and full sets of cups and saucers.” That prompted his own collection and it is still growing, with each new
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