Press conference in Las Vegas
By Flora Yan
Ride2Freedom Youth Ambassador of China
This is Flora Yan, a sophomore from Shorewood High School. I am the student who missed 19 school days include EOC exams, almost all the finals, final projects, and a lot of assignments which originally needed to be turned in before the school ends.
Actually, the 19 absences are for a really impressive and worthy cause.
I became a global youth ambassador of Ride2Freedom biking team in May, 2015. Ride2Freedom is a 3000 mile, 45 day cross-country biking from LA to DC which started on June 1st, the international children's day.
The bicyclists are two dozen youths from 11 to 19 years old who represent 14 countries such as France, Hungary, Iran, Peru, Singapore, India, etc. They came to the U.S. from their own countries just because of this project which is set out to be the largest cycling event in U.S. history.
Our mission through this is to raise awareness of a 16-year persecution to a group of people who practice Falun Gong in China.
Falun Gong, or Falun Dafa, is a spiritual meditation practice based on the three principles of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. It was introduced to the public in 1992, by Mr. Li Hongzhi in the JiLin Province of China. The Chinese Communist Party was supportive with Falun Dafa since it gives millions of people a healthy mind and body and impacted the whole society positively by upgrading people's moral standard in the years between 1992 and 1999.
But soon the Chinese Communist Party saw it as a huge threat to their regime because the number of people who practice Falun Gong is more than the party's members. Later they started the persecution in July 1999, it has already lasted for 16years till today. A lot of awful things happened in the persecution such as the Forced Live Organ Harvesting: Taking away Falun Gong practitioners' organs without anesthesia and their consent while they are still conscious, then selling them in the black market for the party's profit.
All of our riders practiced Falun Dafa since we were really young. Some of our team members even have first-hand experience of this horrible persecution.
My grandma was put into detention center for half of a year when I was only 1 year old, then she was forced to leave her home for one and a half years.
But unfortunately, right now, in America, even in the world, there aren't many people who know about this long-lasted genocide. So that's why we are doing Ride2Freedom -- we are trying to spread the word and let people in the world listen to our young generation's voices.
For more information, you can go to our website. It is linked to our Facebook and other social media pages.
We have already gone through LA, Las Vegas, Cedar City, Salt Lake City, Cheyenne, Denver, Kansas City, Columbia, St. Louis, Ferguson, and Chicago. We will be arriving at Ft. Wayne in Indiana tomorrow.