Promoting Falun Gong in Finland

I was asked to write about how we promote Falun Gong in Finland. I didn't want to write "a report" about this, because I think that this is also some kind of experience sharing. Of course I had a lot of Xinxing conflicts while we were promoting Falun Gong in Finland but I somehow can't remember them so clearly any more.

I had practiced Falun Gong about half a year when another practitioner asked me if I liked to come with her to Finland to a Health Fair in October 1998. I said yes, though I didn't really understand what this was all about. I had been practicing on my own in a little village so I didn't know how important it was to promote Falun Dafa. We were four Finnish female practitioners, one Chinese and one Swedish male practitioner. We shared a room with seven other groups of people who did things like selling different types of tea, selling scarves, driving out evil spirits, healing people, telling peoples fortunes among other things. We had a table for our books and a video to show the excersises. Our video was on all day and other people were watching it all the day long.

We had also reserved and paid for a place to show the exercises in person. When we saw this place, we were little disappointed. It was in a staircase where people would pass by only by accident. We were worried that nobody would see us there and we couldn't give them our information about Falun Gong. However, we thought that we should do our best in the current situation and planned to place a table there and demonstrate the exercises. The next day when were about to get the things ready, to our amazement the staircase was crouded with chairs. Where were we supposed to stand? There were nearly 50 chairs on top of each other. We couldn't show the exercises there, that was for sure. The practitioner, who had reserved this place, got a bit agitated and went to the organizer's to complain that we couldn't practice there. Nobody was interested in removing the chairs because they were so many, so they offered us an other place and we could choose it ourselves. We then got another place in the middle of the cafeteria where everyone could see us clearly and where we gave our leaflets to people. Many people visited our stand and had questions about Falun Gong.

At the Health Fair there were about 30 people who put down their names for an introduktion course and we went back to Finland twice during the spring of 1999 and about 15 people came of those 30 and took part in our workshop. To our knowledge there were at that time no practitioners in Finland. We had not much material in Finnish, only some translations from Swedish and English.

At the Health Fair we thought of starting to translate China Falun Gong into Finnish. We had been living in Sweden for a long time and I for instance talked Swedish better than my native language so at first I thought I would never manage to translate anything. But once we started, it seemed as if we got some help from somewhere, though there were a lot of tribulations too. For instance when we were about to begin the second trip to Finland, we wanted to take half of the book with us in the Finnish language, but only two days before the trip eight pages disappeared from the computer and were nowhere to be found. I had to translate everything again, took two days off from work and managed just about to do it. I can confess now that I was not happy at all about it but it cultivated my forbearance tremendously and besides I learned a lot of Fa, too. When we came back from Finland I found the eight pages on the Internet, which I hardly used and I don't know how I managed to place them there. I started to save everything on a disc.

In June 1999 we contacted a printing house in Finland who was interested in printing China Falun Gong. Then there came the bad news in July about China banning Falun Gong and the printing house cancelled their arrangements with us. In October 1999, we had the same Health Fair in Helsinki and introduced Falun Gong there. This time we were only two persons from Sweden and one person from Finland. The woman from Finland wanted to be a contact person. She practised the movements, but did not study or read the book. Many people came in to our room where we now had a translation of China Falun Gong and the introduction video in Finnish. They talked about China persecuting practitioners and what the newspapers printed about it and what was on TV. We had gotten some news from Finland about what the newspapers printed and we tried to rectify the misleading facts and reports. The other practitioner from Sweden called the TV-stations and the radio to tell them that Falun Gong is not a cult and religion. She was also interviewed on the radio. When the persecution began, she also contacted the foreign office for Human Rights and the office for Asian affairs to inform them about the situation in China. We visited them also after the Health Fair in October and hoped to have their help to solve the problem in China. The office for Asian affairs however could do nothing until something serious happened, which it did. One practitioner died of torture but we knew about that afterwards. The office for Human Rights explained to us that Finland's Prime Minister had pointed out at a meeting, that the Chinese government attended, that China does not respect human rights.

At the Health Fair in October 1999, some people wanted to learn Falun Gong. About 20 people put down their names for a weekend course later on. In November 1999, a Chinese practitioner from London had a business trip to Finland and he offered to have a one-day course in Helsinki if someone was interested. We then wrote to these 20 persons and invited them to the introduction course. Ten of them came and learned the exercises and were introduced to the book China Falun Gong. We have now a rough copy of Zhuan Falun and hope that it will soon be printed as a book. We have also started to translate the 9-day video course into Finnish. We went to Finland in the beginning of March 2000, and found that there were some practitioners who practice at home, but there are no practice groups yet. It seems to be very difficult for Finland to get Falun Dafa.

While we were in Finland we went to the libraries to give them the Swedish China Falun Gong and Zhuan Falun and when the Finnish China Falun Gong was printed we gave it to the libraries together with the exercise video which now was translated into Finnish. On my holidays in Finland I also went to the libraries that didn't have the book. People there did not know what Falun Gong was.

I September 1999, we had a different approach to promoting Falun Dafa in Finland. Seven of us from Sweden, went to Finland, Helsinki for one day, to show the exercises on a Square. People came to see us and one girl told thas she saw us from a pram and had to come to talk to us. She also wanted to learn Falun Gong. Someone had also phoned the newspaper who wrote a report about the event. In October 2000, there was again the Health Fair and at the same time we wanted to promote Fa at the Railway Station and at the same Square as before. Now we were again seven people from Sweden, two at the Health Fair showed the excersises and five outside. The weather was'nt too cold then. About 35 people wanted to learn Falun Gong so we are now on our way back to Finland again.

We do not know how many of these people practice Falun Gong at the moment. There are some people in Turku and in Helsinki who do it. There are no practice sites yet, as far as we know.