Wilma Hunter and Jake Eckert Top 7 Over 70….
SANDRA M STANWAY
Brooks Bulletin
Seven remarkable individuals will be honoured this week during a ceremony for achievements they embarked on at the age of 70 or older demonstrating that it’s never too late to leave a legacy.
Brooks residents Wilma Hunter, 76, and Jake Eckert, 95, will take part in the Community of Southeast Alberta’s inaugural Top 7 over 70 gala in Medicine Hat on Oct. 10.
Wilma Hunter
“It’s very overwhelming. It’s not me that I want to promote. It’s the program,” said Hunter, who learned that she had won the honour on her 76th birthday. Hunter is being recognized for introducing Dress a Girl Around the World to southern Alberta.
Operated through Hope 4 Women International, Dress a Girl provides handmade dresses to girls living in extreme poverty worldwide.
“The main goal for me is just getting word out there about this program so that we can get more people involved and hopefully get groups to start on their own,” she said.
“When it was first suggested that I be nominated, I wasn’t too crazy about the idea because to me it’s more about what we are doing,” she said.
The program was introduced to Brooks in February 2024 and since then 257 dresses have been sewn, 112 have been shipped and seamstresses have been busy in Rolling Hills, Brooks and Hays.
“We’ve been sewing dresses and sending them overseas. We’ve sent some to the Philippines, Eswatini (formerly Swaziland) and Samaritan’s Purse in Calgary who put them into the shoeboxes and send them to where they are the most needed.”
In February seamstresses gathered at the Brooks United Church for a sewing bee due to the access to supplies at the thrift shop. Now her ultimate goal is to keep machines, kits and supplies at the church in one location and also moving to the next program to sew boys shorts for which she has a pattern.
“I’m hoping the group might go for that, too.”
Jake Eckert
In 2018 at the age of 89 Jake (Jacob) Eckert’s true story No More a Stranger was published.
Eckert’s story, which was told to Elsie Loewen who wrote the book, chronicles his Mennonite family’s history of fleeing persecution, violence, and tyranny.
Eckert said he was overwhelmed and surprised when he learned that he had won the award.
“I’m beyond speech. I never thought about it,” he said.
His daughter Lillian Duenk said while she and her brothers were growing up they each heard bits and pieces of their father’s story but each was slightly different and out of order.
“That’s how it started,” he said.
Eckert was born in Blagoveschensk, Siberia, Russia on Sept. 7, 1929.
“They started persecuting people who were not of Russian descent and taking them away, adding more taxes and more hardship,” said Eckert.
“They endured quite a few years. They couldn’t go to the west, like to Europe, because the borders were closed.”
In December 1930 his family along with all 216 villagers joined the Exodus from their Mennonite settlement in eastern Siberia to China escaping across the frozen Amur River.
Over the next 20 years Eckert was immersed in China including the customs and friends as well as short stint in the Red Army.
At the age of 20, Jake, with his mother, brother and two sisters left China for Canada. The family arrived in Bassano by train in 1951 staying at Jake’s uncle Cornelius Eckert’s farm in Rosemary.
Their father was taken by Russians in 1945.
“My father had planted the dream of bringing his family to a land of freedom – and he was the only one to miss reaping its benefits,” he wrote.
Years later the family had found that his father had been ‘forcibly repatriated’. He had died in Kazakhstan.
