I would like to tell you something about True Mother’s visit to Slovakia. Bratislava the capitol of Slovakia was the 73rd city in Mother’s tour. As there are only few suitable halls in Bratislava and they are most of the time booked long ahead, we were happy that maybe the most beautiful of them was free exactly for the day of our event—May 20. We booked this hall almost 3 month in advance even it has quite big capacity—1160 seats. Still we hoped we would fill it.

We were little worried about the reaction of media since a year ago there was some negativity when we had European Family Festival (Blessing) in Bratislava on June 13. But this time media completely ignored our event—only two journalist came to our press conference 2 days before event and no news came out in newspapers.

This time we were again selling tickets at the streets, inviting preblessed couples from the previous blessings by sending them an invitation and free ticket by post and also inviting professors and university representatives to the speech plus World University Federation meeting and VIPs from parliament, government, embassies, churches and others to the speech plus cocktail.

Selling tickets was quite tough, some days only few could be sold. Also, not so many VIPs responded to our invitations.

At the end about 30 VIPs came to the cocktail—from government ministries, different NGOs, artists, journalists. Few more went directly to the hall. At the cocktail Reverend Kwak came to greet all VIPs one by one. At the World University Federation (WUF) meeting there were also about 30 professors who could discuss with Reverend Kwak about WUF.

In between the hall was slowly filling up. At 7 p.m. when the program was scheduled to start there were some 300 or 400 free seats. But in next few minutes the half of them was filled with members from Hungary coming a bit later. So when Mother came to the stage the hall was almost full.

The hall was still full when Mother finished her speech. After 4 or 5 minutes stage was changed and Mother could come back. At the beginning the video connection to True Father in Brazil was good. We could see Father cutting the cake and members singing songs in exchange with our members singing. Then Mother and Father were singing few songs. Unfortunately in this part of the program the video connection broke and we had only voice connection. Nevertheless True Parents continued.

Later I was told that in no other European country True Parents were singing so many songs as in Bratislava and the Bratislava event was maybe the most successful in Europe.

After coming back home I called our national leader. It was almost midnight. He was still in Mother’s hotel. He said he and our Adam NM Rev. Kim were invited to Mother’s suite. When they came in Rev. Kim started to apologize in front of Mother. But she stopped him and said he need not apologize. She said everything was good and she was happy about the event. Then she invited all Slovak members to come to her suite for HDH next morning. This was not planned before.

At 5.30 a.m. the lobby of the hotel was full with some 60 members and the hotel stuff was shocked hearing that all these people want to go to the presidential suite where Mrs. Moon is. First they did not want to allow us to go there. Then they agreed asking us not make a noise in the corridors. So we could all go to Mother’s suite.

First Mother was speaking for some 30 minutes. Mainly about the time we are living in and how we should attend True Parents—she said we have only 7 months left to learn Korean. Then Mother left and Rev. Peter Kim was talking about miracles happening during the Mother’s tour. He was speaking mainly about how people are changing—even journalists who wrote negative articles before write positive ones now. He showed us several of these articles with many color pictures of Mother.

Then Mother came back and invited some members to have breakfast with her. We could even put some more chairs to the table.

Right after breakfast and after signing some brochures with translated text of Mother’s speech Mother left for the airport. Many members were waiting in front of the hotel to say good-bye to Mother and some were also at the airport.

It was 8.50 a.m. when Mother’s plane took off and she left Bratislava after her first visit to Slovakia.

When Mother was leaving and waving to the members at the airport she was smiling the whole time. She looked happy. So we hope that it was not the last visit of True Parents in Slovakia.

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