There won’t be cake or live music, but come hell or a pandemic, the annual corn boil to welcome Mount Allison students to the town of Sackville is going ahead.
Bill Evans is the service projects chair of the Sackville Rotary Club, and one of the organizers of the event.
“The way it’s going to work is the students are going to be in groups, I think they’re in pods or mini bubbles of 15 or fewer. And they will come down at specified times and go through a caution tape path, and they will be served, you know, at a respectful distance, prepared buttered corn. They will be able to pick up individual packets of salt and pepper. They will get an apple from councillors. And then they will leave. There’ll be no mingling, no hanging around. So it’s not going to be like the party that it used to be.”
The corn boil has been a tradition in Sackville for about a decade, and is the product of a partnership among the Rotary Club, the town of Sackville, and Mount Allison’s Orientation team.
“It’s a nice synergy. The goal of it is to welcome the new students to town, to make a good first impression. And to sort of get off on the right foot. That we’re all in this together, even before it was a bubble.”
Evans says in the past, the corn boil has been an open event.
“I remember when Jean Paul Boudreau, his first year here, I remember him coming down. And it was just, you know, a beautiful sunny day and people are standing around and there’s live music and we’re eating corn and there’s a splash pad… And it’s just a festive, very good first impression of the town. It’s not going to be like that…
It’s going to be different and it’s going to be a little bit strange. But we are trying to normalize an abnormal situation. And we’re trying to make it pleasant. We’re trying to be welcoming, but we’re trying to ensure that we’re appropriately careful. So finding that balance, as in everything in life, is the challenge.”
Students will be pre-registered, with contact tracing information already collected, says Evans. And staff and volunteers will be masked and wearing gloves. Evans says the team has been working with the Department of Health to ensure what they’re doing follows current guidelines.
“It’s really important to me, personally, that it go well, because we’re trying to do a good thing in strange times, and we really wouldn’t want to cause a problem.”
The corn boil happens throughout the day on Sunday, September 6th, at the Bill Johnstone Memorial park in downtown Sackville.
