I'm a Greek practitioner who has been living in Sweden since 1971. My Swedish wife, my daughter, and I began practising Falun Gong in 1998.

I thought about Greece and the people there and I wished that the Falun Gong books could be available in Greek. As my Greek is not good enough for translating the books, I couldn't do that by myself. I thought that I just had to go to Greece because Falun Dafa is not known in Greece. The few articles that have appeared in the media have been mostly bad. So now I decided that I just had to do it. In fact, if there had been someone else doing it already I wouldn't have been in such a hurry to go back, but just because there wasn't anyone, I thought I really had no choice. What about all those people who hadn't heard of Falun Dafa, or had been misled by the lies spread by the Chinese government? I couldn't just stand aside and watch.

So I left my home in Sweden by car and headed for Greece. On the car I had two large Falun Dafa signs.

Traveling through Germany I noticed that just about every car that passed me saw the Falun Dafa sign. Many people turned around and looked for a while and children waved their hands. In Germany I stayed at another practitioner's home. We were invited for dinner with a Chinese couple and a man. They were surprised to see that a Westerner was practising Falun Dafa, so they had a lot of questions for me. I was happy to be able to clarify the truth about Falun Dafa to them. It turned out that one of them had attended Teacher Li Hongzhi's lecture in Frankfurt in 1998 and had started practising Falun Gong, but stopped because of the persecution. For the first time I realized that some people outside of China had stopped practising because of the persecution. It was unbelievable to me.

I practised the Falun Gong exercises on the boat from Italy to Greece. Three children practiced the exercises with me at least three times. They liked the fifth set, which is the sitting meditation, the most. The parents also became interested and after they got the German Falun Dafa paper they were happy to see that there were practice sites in their hometowns in Austria and Germany. Many people, on seeing my Falun Dafa t-shirt, asked me what I was doing. During the whole trip I felt very calm and harmonious.

Getting close to Greece I suddenly became nervous, doubting what I was doing, but when I drove the car onto Greek soil, I felt very comfortable and all the nervousness disappeared. I felt very sure that I had done the right thing.

Greece is totally different from the rest of Western Europe. It is a whole country where people had never heard about Falun Dafa. Translating the book was very important. I got help from people who just started the practice. The translation finished quickly. Falun Gong [the introductory book] is translated now, and is posted on the Internet. Greeks can finally read about Falun Dafa in Greek. Two other practitioners are now translating Zhuan Falun [the main book of Falun Gong].

á

Reprinted from Clear Harmony Net