Unlike his fellow pilgrims, Adam Metivier of Old Town is sleeping late at World Youth Day.

The 15-year-old gets up at 5:30 a.m. six days a week to deliver the Bangor Daily News. In Toronto, he’s been able to sleep until 7 a.m.

He is the youngest member of the Maine delegation, and technically he’s not old enough to be at the event, reserved for Catholics between ages 16 and 35. He traveled with fellow parishioners from Holy Family Catholic Church in Old Town, including his aunt and uncle, Jeannette and Randy Bernard of Old Town, as well as his cousin Ryan Bernard.

“I thought it was kind of a privilege to be the only one [of his age] to come on this pilgrimage, and thought it would be a great experience to have at such a young age and sort of get a feel for it,” he said after a late-night game of cribbage outside a function room in the hotel. “It’s not quite what I expected. I wish there was more time for just your parish to go off and experience things … together, not with so much craziness, not so hectic.”

Michelle Mays, 26, is young enough to be categorized as “youth” for WYD but is attending the event in charge of six teen-agers from St. Joseph Catholic Church in Ellsworth. A native of New Zealand, she lives in Southwest Harbor with her husband, Andy, a lobsterman.

“I feel so filled with the spirit,” she said.

“Things just keep happening like from nowhere,” she said while her partner chaperone, Michael Springer, laundered the group’s Maine T-shirts at the hotel.

“I found out that there were people from New Zealand here, and all day long I kept seeing the Australian flag and getting really hyped up and then being disappointed because it wasn’t New Zealand. Then, at the very end of the night [Thursday], I turned around to head-count the kids, and there was the New Zealand flag. So, it was like, seek and you shall find. … To be this far away from home and to find New Zealand is really very powerful – because we are all in this together.”

This is the first trip the Ellsworth group has taken together, and it has been a learning experience for the adults as well as the teens, according to Mays.

She said that during the first three days of the eight-day trip, the young people have begun to trust the adults more as they have accomplished some tricky enterprises, such as trying to maneuver through a sea of people closer to the stage where Pope John Paul II spoke Thursday.

On the Toronto subway, she met two men from the African nation of Cameroon who have been living in Toronto for four months. They started talking about being Catholic and living in a foreign country, as well as the problems of interfaith marriages.

Mays said they had more in common than she expected.

“I told them that when I met my husband, I called my parents and I told them I’d met this really great guy,” Mays said. “They said, ‘Why didn’t you find somebody from New Zealand? Why did it have to be someone in America?’ But my grandmother said, ‘Is he Catholic?’ And I said, ‘Yeah. He’s a Polish Catholic.’ She said, ‘Oh, they’re good Catholics, those Polish ones.’ And that was all she wanted to know.

“So, there we were, this girl from New Zealand who lived in Maine and this guy from Cameroon … who had just moved to Toronto talking about how important it is to share your faith within your marriage and how much easier that makes your life together. Just things like that. Just connecting with people from all over the world who believe what we believe, who think what we think.”

The fingers of the girls from St. Bruno’s are never still, except when they are praying.

On the bus, waiting for meals or for Mass to begin, Katie Dumond, Kristin Cyr, Amy Vaillancourt and Nikki Ouellette are busy turning brightly colored cord into knotted rosaries.

The four 16-year-olds from St. Bruno’s Catholic Church in Van Buren learned to make the rosaries during the two-day bus ride from Maine to WYD. Like the other 200,000 young people here, the girls brought potato pins and lobster pins to trade with pilgrims from other countries, but it’s the rosaries that teen-agers from Colombia and other countries beg for.

The knotted rosary trail leads directly to the Rev. Robert Vaillancourt, no relation to Amy. Parishioners in Old Town, Bridgton, Fryeburg and now Madawaska, where he is pastor at St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church, know how to make them.

“Father Bob” however, said Loretta LaBree of Old Town taught him to make them during a pilgrimage from Rome to Assisi, Italy.

St. Bruno’s girls did not care who taught them how to make the rosaries they worked on as they waited Thursday afternoon to get a quick glimpse of the pope.

“Knowing he traveled a long way just to see us means a lot. He knows we’re the future of the church,” said Amy Vaillancourt as she wrapped the cord around her index finger three times, then pulled tightened it.

Ouellette holds the St. Bruno’s girls’ record for rosary making. She refused to let her fingers rest before she headed to the Saturday night vigil with the pope. The girls want to have as many rosaries as possible blessed by the pope so they can take them home for parishioners in Aroostook County.

Compiled by NEWS reporter Judy Harrison