Germany: Falun Gong and Lotus Flowers to the Fore at The Altonale Culture Festival

From the beginning of June, Hamburg celebrated the “Altonale”, a seventeen day cultural event, where one will find many artists, clubs and their members, craftsmen and women, and all kinds of other initiatives. The three day street celebrations are the highlight of the “Altonale.” Generally, around 500,000 people will come for that part of the “Altonale.” Falun Gong practitioners from Hamburg, Bremen and Bad Salzuflen (even from Tenerife) took part in this part of the “Altonale” for the sixth time.

With the theme “The Path of Falun Gong” we organised a photo exhibition in two pavilions. This exhibition was divided into different periods of Falun Gong in this world. Photos about the dissemination of Falun Gong, photos about the persecution that began in July of 1999, as well as photos about the peaceful protests that call for an end to the torture and murder of Falun Gong practitioners in China. Practitioners displayed posters from the international art exhibition “Truthfulness, Compassion, Tolerance,” and had ready a large amount of information material about Falun Gong and the persecution and the book Zhuan Falun in many languages, in the hope of bringing the information closer to the visitors.

In the third pavilion, people had the opportunity to learn from practitioners how to fold paper Lotus flowers. This was very popular with visitors and our practitioners were busy all day long. A little girl came when we were setting up the booth. She had spent two entire days making Lotus flowers during the past two years events. She asked when everything was ready.

Another popular attraction was the Falun Gong exercises. Every time we showed the exercises peoples showed great interest in watching them. Some stopped for a long time. They appeared as by just observing they harmonised with the environment. Some wanted to find out more information and asked questions about the effect and how to practice. They also wanted to know where in Hamburg they could learn Falun Gong. The practitioners believe from the many deep discussions they had that the people already had been exposed to Falun Gong and now wanted to delve more deeply into the practice.

Without doubt they all expressed their dismay about the persecution and organ theft from Falun Gong practitioners by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and they just could not understand that something like that could happen. One of the women listened carefully to details about Falun Gong and showed a deep understanding of the intricacies of the persecution by the CCP. She asked for information material and promised to distribute it.

It is just as Master said, the situation is changing continuously and the people become clearer about the truth behind the persecution of Falun Gong in China.

Originally published in German at: http://clearharmony.de/articles/200706/38411.html