SA’s International Committee will sometimes receive a request from a member to fund an expensive meeting location, because of difficulties finding an affordable space in a desired location. I’ve heard the reasoning that affordable meeting places cannot be easily found outside the USA.

After receiving one such recent request, I felt that (besides my concern as to whether the idea complies with the Seventh Tradition) an inexpensive location could be found with a bit more searching. This was based on my own experiences in setting up new SA meetings in Utrecht and Mexico City.

About two years ago, some of us members of the SA Amsterdam group decided to set up a new meeting in the nearby city of Utrecht. At the time, we had only one SA member living in Utrecht, and he did all the work of locating a meeting place: making a list of churches and contacting them. The general response from the churches was, “You can rent a room but you will have to pay the competitive price”—which, in the city center of Utrecht, is around 50 to 100 euro ($65 to $130) per hour.

Utrecht has the most expensive real estate in the country, and we could not pay that unless we could quickly get 30 fellows in the meeting—and that’s more than the total amount of members in the Netherlands. We were discouraged; we had hoped for a bit more compassion from churches.

Still, this fellow simply continued looking, a bit further outside the of the city center, and one day he got “lucky” (I use quotes, because my view about what luck is has changed). There was a lot of publicity those days because of the movie “Shame,” and one clinic decided to allow us to meet in their location, at a fee of 10 euros per month. We still meet in that clinic.

The same thing happened when I was visiting Mexico City last summer. There was no SA meeting in the city when I arrived, but with the help of my Higher Power I found a couple of suffering sexaholics who wanted to start one. Mexican members contacted various locations with no response—except for facilities that charged an unfeasible rent.

Having no regular SA meetings, I attended an English-speaking AA meeting that took place in a local Mexican church—but I had no time and no courage to contact the church and ask them (in my broken Spanish) for an SA meeting space. However, one rainy day I forgot my umbrella at the English AA meeting. I saw this as a sign from my Higher Power to get me to go back to the church, pick up the umbrella, and talk to the priest about SA. And so I went. I summoned all my courage and asked for the priest. I spoke with him in Spanish, and everything went perfectly! The priest was quite interested; in fact he was wondering why he had not heard of SA before! He offered us a meeting room for just a voluntary contribution.

Some International SA members and groups do struggle to set up sustainable groups and achieve sexual sobriety. In looking for explanations, I’ve heard members say things such as: “It doesn’t work here because things in our country are different from the U.S. We are poor, there is a macho culture here, our churches are different, we are… etc.” But my experience is that the externals do not matter, only the internals. The questions are: How are the SA members and groups organized and functioning? Do they persist in working the Steps—meeting or no meeting, setbacks or no setbacks? That is what really matters.

This morning, during a service of my faith tradition, I heard: “Persist, and you will receive your life.” I’m certain that sexaholics who desire recovery will be rewarded if they continue searching and trying to set up an SA meeting wherever they are in the world. God always comes through.