United Beyond the Barriers of Language, Culture and Countries: Experience Report from Belgium

Ghent, Belgium
20th October 2001

On Saturday 20th October 2001 a group of 13 practitioners, 11 Taiwanese and 2 Belgian practitioners, went to Ghent (the city where the day before a EU-summit had been held and 300 practitioners had been doing group-exercises in the park) to do tell the truth about Falun Gong.

They practised in the biggest shopping street of the town, distributed over 2000 flyers, collected over 200 signatures and clarified the truth to hundreds of people.
Our activities attracted a lot of attention including that of some police officers. During the afternoon more then 10 police officers passed the temporary practice site, none of them made a remark or asked us to leave the place.

Several times dark clouds came and rain started to fall down. Each time we maintained righteous thoughts and the clouds and rain subsided, so that we could continue our truth clarifying activities. There were a lot of people walking on the streets and our activities had a big effect. Only a few minutes before we were going to leave the rain really started to fall down and the wind became stronger. But this was not before we had finished distributing the last flyers and collecting the last signatures until we had no more free space for signatures on our petition forms.

The effect was great. A lot of people where simply amazed when they heard about the atrocities going on in China and asked how they could help even before we could ask them to sign the petition. Also a number of people had already seen us the day before, while practising with a group of 300 practitioners in the park, on the occasion of the EU-summit. As a result of all the attention that we had attracted on that day, they came back to us and asked for details of the practice site.

Another remarkable thing happened. The bond between the 2 Belgian practitioners and the 11 Taiwanese practitioners became very strong, resulting in a very close and effective cooperation, even without using a lot of words, because of the language barrier. Where these practitioners of different continents would normally have had only very brief contact, or maybe even no contact at all with each other, the feeling of mutual connection and being one group became very strong very rapidly. This was also a very powerful and touching experience for me.

Belgian practitioner
20th October 2001