Panhandling With A Higher Purpose Begging Uncle Raises Thousands For Girl With Rare Liver Disease

Toni Wilkinson thought someone was using her daughter’s rare liver disease to cash in on people’s holiday sympathies.

Turns out the man was her daughter’s uncle, a truck driver who raised $4,555.70 by displaying the girl’s picture and a sign on his brown Ford pickup last Saturday.

“We really about hung my brother,” said Wilkinson. Before she learned he was the guy with the sign, she had asked a local radio station to broadcast a warning about the creative beggar. Her next call would have been to police.

Instead, she called her mother and learned of Gerald Dunham’s plan to raise money for Elizabeth Hulsey. She’s fighting a life-threatening liver disease and may need a transplant operation.

Dunham’s traffic-stopping sign read: “Rare Disease…Please help give the gift of life.”

He displayed it and an oversized school photo of Elizabeth on the back of his pickup parked at an intersection.

He spent several hours Saturday and several hours over the next two days at his roadside vigil. Donations came to $4,555.70, mostly in $1 bills.

“I started out with a coffee can, and I put a picture of Elizabeth on it. But it filled up so fast and so full I had to use the cardboard box I keep in my truck as a trash can,” he said.

The idea to collect at the roadside struck him after seeing a ragged-looking man successfully panhandling, he said.

“He was receiving money hand over fist,” Dunham said. “If people were willing to help him, I thought they’d have to be willing to help a 16-year-old sweetheart who hasn’t seen anything.”

Elizabeth is covered by her step-father’s health insurance, but the family is anticipating some large bills for hospital co-payments, medications and travel and lodging during trips to Portland. That’s where Elizabeth must go for special tests and possibly a transplant.

The family deposited the donated money in a special account in Elizabeth’s name at a local U.S. Bank branch.

The Harrisburg High School junior became ill this fall and learned in September that her problems are likely caused by primary biliary cirrhosis, a chronic liver-destroying disease usually only seen in middle-age or older adults.

Complications can be treated with drugs and surgery. But when the liver begins to fail, survival depends on a liver transplant.