(Clearwisdom.net) On September 21, 2002, the City of St. Louis in Missouri celebrated the great Forest Park Balloon Race. The popular hot air balloon race was celebrating its 30th year, after being cancelled last year due to the September 11th tragedy. Over 100,000 people were estimated to attend this year.
Autumn has just arrived here. In the early morning, many enthusiastic people went Forest Park to view the spectacular hot air balloon race. Local Falun Gong practitioners also went there in the morning and hung a Dafa banner near the site where the hot air balloons would take off. They set up the display boards and placed Dafa truth-clarifying materials in order and then started demonstrating the 5-set of Falun Gong exercises.
Our demonstrations quickly drew attention from visitors who came over to watch. When people learned the true facts of the persecution practitioners in China have been suffering, they immediately signed their names on the petition postcards being mailed to President Bush. Some people wanted to donate some money. Practitioners kindly and politely declined their offer and explained the reason. Some people came over to learn the exercises and could not help saying again and again: Wonderful! I feel so relaxed and comfortable! Some said that they would go to the practice site and do the exercises the next morning.
Practitioners noticed that because westerners live in a free and democratic society and are accustomed to independently judging right or wrong, it is fairly easy for them acquire the positive and righteous attitude towards Dafa. Unfortunately, the Chinese people, especially those who just recently came to the US and had been misled for a long period of time by the propaganda from the Chinese state-run media, were reluctant to come over to learn about the true facts of Falun Dafa. Some practitioners realized that there had to be Chinese people among the crowds of visitors. So they took some truth-clarifying literature in Chinese and went into the sea of people to look for the precious Chinese people. Through conversations, we found out that most of the Chinese people would like to listen to practitioners clarifying the true facts about Dafa and accepted the literatures. While taking the truth-clarifying materials, some people even considerately said, "Let us take one only and you keep those for others. It is not easy for you (to print the literature)." Some said that they knew some practitioners and had also read Dafa truth-clarifying materials before and expressed that the (Jiang regime's) persecution is definitely wrong. We could see that they were moved by Dafa's grace and majesty.
Through this truth-clarification event, practitioners realized that, the precious Chinese people could be found everywhere overseas. We will continue to take the initiative to look for them and to clarify the truth to them so as to be worthy of Dafa's immense mercy towards all sentient beings.
