The Dragon's Head Blog: Participating in Cultural Harmony
Many participants from a number of locations in the Toronto Branch actively supported our involvement in the 2018 Rotary International Convention at the Metro Convention Centre from June 23 to June 27.
It was a significant commitment because we needed to cover 60 hours at our booth during the five days of the conference, and we also had the opportunity to present the Taoist Tai Chi® arts on the main stage with two 30- minute demos in an interactive session with many Rotarians in attendance.
Rotary is an international community-based service group organization dedicated to taking action on a number of social issues, including promoting peace, fighting disease and providing clean water to all.
One of the key conference venues was the Rotary House of Friendship where more than 30,000 Rotarians met daily to hold meetings, attend seminars, exchange ideas and to visit many booths, including ours promoting the health benefits of the Taoist Tai Chi® arts .
Undoubtedly, this is the largest scale and longest ongoing demo that Toronto Branch has organised and participated in. The planning took several weeks and we needed to ensure we had adequate coverage in each hour of each day, however, our training prepares us precisely for this very task. Consider the planning we do for CIT week, all the annual events, workshops in our home countries and abroad, banquets, intensives, large and small demos, some with the Dragon and community service, participating in city street fairs and country celebrations.
Prior to CIT week at the International Centre, we asked participants from many countries to bring their country information brochures with them so that we had them on hand to give out at the Rotary convention.
At the booth, the participants met and spoke to many Rotarians from the Far East, Southeast Asia, the African continent , Europe, Canada, the United States of America, South America, Australia and New Zealand about our organisation, our practice and the work that we do.
We also had some fun teaching the set with lots of visitors, including big-hearted David, a Harlem Warriors basketball player.
“All cultures moving together in harmony” is very much the essence of one of the Aims and Objectives of Fung Loy Kok Institute of Taoism, and those who helped experienced a wonderful exchange of culture in an incredibly diverse and peaceful environment with many folks from around the world.