An Aberaeron mum has expressed her gratitude for the ‘amazing’ way the local community have rallied around to help her brain-damaged daughter.

Little Clara Rogers is blind, suffers from HIE and has Spastic Cerebral Palsy.

Clara’s mum Sera-Jane Thomas managed to raise £10,000 for her to travel to the United States for essential therapy last year and Clara will be making a return visit to Boston’s ground-breaking Napa Centre in October.

“Last year’s visit was a really successful trip,” Sera-Jane told the Cambrian News.

“Although £10,000 was the initial target, by the September we’d managed to raise £16,000.

Now she is focused on raising further funds through the Just4Children charity to finance a second trip.

“I still cannot believe the generosity of the local community and the amount we have raised,” said Sera-Jane, who also has two other children.

“At the beginning I felt like I was facing Mount Everest.”

Little Clara suffered oxygen starvation when she was born in February 2018, was unable to breathe unaided and her organs were failing.

“It felt like she was slipping away,” said mum Sera-Jane Thomas.

But plucky Clara battled to survive, and her mum launched a fundraising drive to get her specialist care in America.

See this week’s South Ceredigion paper for the full story, available in shops and as a digital edition now