‘Hey, wanna trade?’ Maine pilgrims swap trinkets, each with its own story

TORONTO – The currency of World Youth Day 2002 was not Canada’s colorful bills sporting pictures of prime ministers, the queen and the common loon. More valuable than money were the pins, buttons, stickers, tattoos, rosaries and T-shirts the 300,000 pilgrims constantly traded.

By the time he began the final leg of his trip – an eight-mile walk to Downsview Park for an overnight vigil and Sunday Mass with Pope John Paul II – Ryan Bernard, 19, of Old Town had just five of the 100 lobster tattoos he had brought. He estimated he had traded away more than 200 lobster, potato, blueberry and state of Maine pins, plus 100 lobster stickers.

“Trading really brings World Youth Day to its full effect,” he said. “I think it shows us how many people from different countries are here.

“We bring anything that represents where we’re from, and other people from other countries do the same exact thing. And everyone has a story to go along with why they’re giving you this and what its significance is. The only things I really have left are my two Maine T-shirts.”

Few pilgrims simply gave away pins or other trinkets without getting something in return.

Members of St. Matthew’s Catholic Church in Hampden made buttons with the church logo on them for their young people to take along. With the buttons in her backpack, postcard collector Ashley Palmer, 16, of Hampden thought her idea of giving out Maine postcards with her name and address on them and asking people to send her postcards when they returned was pretty original – until she ran into some Australians.

They asked her if she’d ever tasted veggiemite.

“Veggiemite is this gross tar-looking substance that they put on toast,” Palmer said. “It’s very salty tasting, but they gave me a really neat Australian magnet with koala bears on it. … I met a woman from Venice, Italy, on a bus and I gave her one of my postcards and she said she’d send one back to me.”

T-shirts were the hottest commodity.

Each of the Catholics from Maine attending World Youth Day was issued two identical blue T-shirts with the logo for the youth programs run by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland printed on the back. Groups from dioceses around the world could be seen all week walking the streets of the city clad in matching T-shirts.

That made it much easier for people to find each other if they became separated, and for the group to stay together, according to Jean Bigelow, youth ministry director for the diocese. Chaperones and youth spent Thursday night in their hotel laundry, washing and drying the T-shirts for their groups. Pilgrims were told in no uncertain terms not to trade their T-shirts until Saturday night at the earliest.

Patrick Gaffney-Kessell, 18, of Surry confessed as the pilgrim walk began Saturday morning that he had traded his T-shirt with someone from a diocese in Texas on Tuesday, the day he arrived in Toronto. He said he and his friends also received pins from all over the world in exchange for the clay moose pins his youth group from St. Joseph Catholic Church in Ellsworth had made.

Gaffney-Kessell, who is 6 feet 2 inches tall, was hard to lose in a crowd. Just before leaving on the trip, he died his blond hair purple and spiked it with hair gel every morning.

He said he did it so he would stand out more in a crowd.

The senior at George Stevens Academy said he’s really a shy person. “For me, the most challenging thing about being here has been talking to people,” he said. “I just have a hard time talking to people easily. But, here, I’ve found that I can just go up and start talking to people because of the faith that we share.”

That, they all seemed to agree, was the one and only thing they would not trade for anything.