Ken Kellar
St. Mary’s Church here was filled with the aroma of cinnamon this past weekend as youths and parent volunteers baked sticky buns to raise money for a pilgrimage to Poland in 2016.
The fundraiser aimed to bake and sell 64 dozen “Cousineau-style” buns in order to help send six youths and two chaperones from here to the next World Youth Day.
“It’s happening in Kraków, Poland in July of 2016,” noted Ken Desjardins, one of the leaders of the St. Mary’s Youth Group.
“It’s the first time it’s happening in the home of John Paul II,” he added.
Desjardins, one of the potential chaperones, was overseeing the baking process in the parish kitchen Saturday afternoon.
“Right now we’ve just started fundraising,” he explained. “This is the second fundraiser for the event.
“It’s going to cost [roughly] $3,500-$3,800 to go per person, and that’s going to be a 15-day trip.”
The local group currently is planning to travel with a larger one from Thunder Bay, which is being led by an area priest who hails from Poland.
The sticky buns, made from scratch over the weekend, are an old family recipe. Desjardins said he grew up with the recipes from his grandmother, Helen Cousineau.
“The Cousineau-style sticky bun . . . is basically your regular cinnamon but with a sticky goo that you bake it in so that when you overturn it, this goo just flows all over it,” he described.
“It’s something that they sold from the Bonnie Blue for countless years.”
This wasn’t the first time Desjardins and the youth group have used Bonnie Blue recipes to raise money. A previous fundraiser made and sold 220 homemade meat pies.
Many of the youth who spent their weekend in the kitchen are the same ones who will be taking the pilgrimage to Poland. But if baking the weekend away sounds like a chore, they would disagree.
“It’s just nice to know that you’re working for the same cause, and you get to see each other grow in the journey towards the goal,” said Shawn Brady, who will be the third in his family to attend a World Youth Day.
World Youth Day is an international event held every three years, in which Roman Catholic youth from around the world gather and take part in a nearly week-long celebration held by the Pope.
The last event was held in Brazil in 2013.
The World Youth Day being held in Poland in 2016 will be the fifth the St. Mary’s Youth Group has sent members to.
About $600 was raised this past weekend, bringing the group’s current total to $4,800.
The group estimates it will cost $28,000 to fund all eight travellers.
