Girl Scout gives seniors outdoor exercise equipment

PALMER — It was a friend who encouraged Ellie Hakari to build exercise equipment for seniors at the Alaska Veterans and Pioneers Home in Palmer.

That friend was Twila Kaiser, who passed away last year two days before Christmas at the age of 96. She’s mentioned on a small plaque attached to one of the pieces of equipment.

“In Memory of Twila Kaiser,” it reads, “my friend.”

Hakari, who will turn 17 in a month, loved visiting Twila. Hakari would play her violin for her, which Twila loved.

“She was always so positive and loved everything that was going on in my life,” Hakari wrote in a newsletter to supporters of her exercise equipment project. “When Twila died this past December, I felt very sad and very empty inside.”

So she decided to do something for the seniors at the home. She said she settled on the idea of exercise equipment because the summers in Mat-Su are so splendid and Twila’s favorite thing was to get out of her room and get outside.

The two pieces — to buy them she raised $2,500 with bake sales and raffles — include one that helps exercise the oblique and abdominal muscles and a machine that simulates Nordic skiing.

Hakari said the project to decide what pieces to buy — the seniors told her which they wanted in a survey — raise the money and everything else took about a year.

The installation took just a day. Though it wasn’t easy.

“We learned very quickly that it takes a lot more cement than you think,” she said, leading a brief impromptu tour of the machines.

Josh Shaver, administrator at the Veterans and Pioneers Home, mentioned the holes she filled with cement in praising Hakari.

“She’s shown such a great level of follow-through and the ability to dig a perfectly rectangular hole,” Shaver said.

He called the project “touching” and described Hakari as “amazing.”

All of this effort added up to a Girl Scout Gold Award that Hakari received at Monday’s ceremony at the home. She played her violin for the assembled crowd.

The first tune, “Amazing Grace,” was the one Twila said she liked most, the last one Hakari played for her.

Rep. Shelley Hughes, R-Palmer, said that her own Girl Scout troop, Troop 49, made up of female state workers, female legislators and Alaska’s first lady, would send Hakari a certificate soon.

“This is really special to me to be able to honor a young woman who has done something as impressive as this,” Hughes said.

Outside, looking at the equipment, Hakari said that her family and three other members of her troop had helped put them up. One of those other Scouts, Elizabeth Watchus, was at Monday’s ceremony to look over the final product.

Watchus said she’s investigating a project of her own, a Silver Award project.

Hakari said that early in the effort she planned to call it The Twila Project after her friend. When she set up an account to hold donations, a bank teller misheard and inadvertently renamed it Project Twilight.

Which, Hakari said, is fitting for a senior center project. It’s the seniors, after all, who matter, she said at the end of a video presentation. She said she hopes the equipment will improve the quality of their lives.

“I’m glad that I was able to make such a difference,” she says in the video.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.