For years, SA outreach around the world depended to a large extent on occasional visits outside the US by sober members, and regular telephone outreach in response to inquiries, carried out almost entirely by Roy K. The first task of Indrei R. and Jose Maria R., as co-chairs of the International Committee, was to work out a modus operandi between ourselves as Roy’s successors and to set up a network of international contact members around the world.

At 5:45 this morning I woke to the sound of music from the house opposite floating through our open windows. I was in one of those headspaces, which have plagued me on waking up, since I got into recovery. I tried to go back to sleep; I didn’t really want to get up and take the actions.

When I returned to my hometown of Louisville, KY in 1996 from San Diego, I desperately needed to connect with an SA group. Unfortunately, the eight or nine men that made up the Louisville group had strayed far from the SA meeting format I had grown accustomed to. The group hosted members with various addictions, including sexual addiction, and the emphasis was on Bible study. I tried to get the group back on track, but over a period of time the men dropped out and Louisville SA became a group of one.

When I entered the program in 1992, there were two SA meetings in Northern Virginia — one in Falls Church and one in Alexandria, which moved in 1994 to Crystal City. There were four people with more than a year of sobriety, one with five years, another with seven and two with over a year.

(Editor’s note: Following the call for lust inventories at the recent Daytona Beach Conference, the International Central Office reports that several SA groups have called and expressed a desire to follow through on taking lust inventories, and requested guidelines on how to do it. The following guidelines, written by Roy K., are submitted by the North Hollywood SA group)

This may strike you as an unusual title for an article in the Essay. The reason is that I’m writing to invite you to consider becoming part of SA’s outreach into prisons. As you may know, the prison system often identifies inmates by a number. This didn’t mean all that much to me until I became friends with one of those numbers.

Many service opportunities are open at the national level. All committees need members from the fellowship to come forward and serve. Some service requires special talents — such as, the Legal Committee. Most committees just need time and the willingness to serve.

The reason the SA International Central Office sells the White Book at a 300 percent markup [see Essay, Dec. 1996] is because not enough groups and individuals are sending an adequate amount of money to Central Office. Most of the meetings in our area pass around two baskets at 7th Tradition time.

The Third Step has been the hardest and most confusing for me. It would have been much easier had I better understood and practiced the first two Steps from the start.

At a recent meeting several people bemoaned the fact that they acted out against their own self-interest. They did not want to act out but felt compelled to do so.

The Millvale Group in Summerside is one of two groups on Prince Edward Island, Canada. We have approximately 15 members who attend regularly.

It feels so wonderful to have at last an SA meeting here in Greensboro, NC. This meeting came about as a result of our Higher Power expressing himself through the group conscience process. Four weeks ago, after much prayer, discussion and deliberation, our Wednesday night SAA group held a group conscience and voted unanimously to become an SA meeting.

The Belfast SA group began after Chris B. went to the Waterford Conference in October 1996 on the advice of an American clergyman. Since then, SA meetings have been held every two weeks in a local parish center. For the most part there were only two people in attendance. Recently, however, two others heard about SA through other 12-Step fellowships and have been introduced to SA literature and meetings.

The new Interfellowship Committee will communicate with other “S”-fellowships. A member of each of the other “S”-fellowships will be invited to attend the SA Today meeting at the next International Conference.

An article in the December 1996 issue of the Essay mentioned that while it only costs three dollars to publish a copy of the SA White Book, we charge ten dollars in order to raise enough funds to keep SA operating.

It’s 11:15 a.m. on the second Saturday morning of the month in Silver Spring, MD, a suburb of Washington, DC. The regular Saturday morning SA meeting has let out and the Maryland/Washington DC/Virginia Intergroup meeting is about to begin. I drove 35 minutes to be here; others came from as far away as the Maryland-Pennsylvania border or Fredericksburg, VA, both well over an hour’s drive away.

I have been coming to SA for over two years. I am now 150 days sober. I believe that my history of achieving a few months’ sobriety and then slipping lies with my ego. I seem to lack humility, which causes me to believe too much in my own way of seeing the world, no matter how painful that is, rather than accepting other people’s guidance and support.

That’s what the man on the SA tape told me to do for my boss. My boss told me I was a “permanent temporary” and that I wouldn’t be hired as a permanent employee. When he told me that, I had been on the job about a year and a half. As I went through the Steps again, I prayed for the people on my resentment list. The man on the tape told me to pray for them until I meant it, and I did.

As a shy and overweight teenager, I retreated into a secret world of masturbation. This covered feelings I couldn’t handle and made me feel good about myself. It was my first drug: medication through masturbation.

The Solution states that “We saw that our problem was threefold: physical, emotional and spiritual. Healing had to come about in all three.” A number of us have found that the emotional and spiritual are well dealt with in meetings and in the literature, but that there is not much discussion on the physical aspect of recovery.