Our Hungarian fellowship was established in September 2019 on the closing day of the SA conference held in Budapest. The determination and enthusiasm that set us on the road is still with us to this day.

Dear Members of SA,
Have you heard of the SA Board of Trustees? Do you have any idea what service the Trustees provide our fellowship? Have you ever thought that you might be a candidate to serve as a Trustee? Whatever your answers to these questions, we invite you to read on and learn more about this particular service opportunity.

In 2005, my AA sponsor told me: “I found the solution for you, SA has arrived in Venezuela.” He put me in contact with a member who had several copies of the White Book. I read it in one sitting, from beginning to end, and totally identified.

When I came into the program about ten years ago, there wasn’t much Persian-translated SA literature. We didn’t have any translation of the SA White Book yet. This led to an imperfect understanding of the Sobriety Definition, which caused our fellowship to have loose or erroneous interpretations of it for many years.

The photo below was taken from a bluff overlooking the Turnagain Arm and the Chugach Mountain Range of Alaska. Let me share with you the story behind it.

This is what Step 4 is designed to achieve. The question “What was my part?” is not designed to blame the victim who has a resentment against a wrong that was done to them. The question goes to what part of me is broken that keeps this pain alive? How have I taken myself out of the land of the living because of this resentment?

Ironically, I spent the first nine months of my existence in a dark place, a sort of tunnel, sheltered from the light, from real life, as it were. Then, I was thrust into the light, into the real world. But, over time, I found this light blinding and painful. All I knew to do was to look for a dark place to escape back to, somewhere that made me feel better.

This year I celebrated five years of SA sobriety, one day at the time, one moment at a time, one hour at a time and so on … This is a miracle that I have been blessed with. Could this have been possible before? No, it was not possible.

A woman in AA told me after she spoke in a meeting, quoting Chapter 5 in Alcoholics Anonymous, that “God could and would, if He were sought.” And that’s how I did it. By letting God do it. Because I couldn’t. But God could and would – and did. But I had to go to meetings to learn things like that. “Meetings, meetings, meetings, meetings, meetings … ” That’s what they told me. “Just keep bringing the body.” (SA 158)

My name is Bill, and I am a recovered sexaholic. My sobriety date is September 4, 1993, and for that I am never sufficiently grateful. When I arrived in SA, I was hopeless and suicidally depressed from over 35 years of untreated addiction.

When I entered the room of my first SA meeting in September 2018, I was the only female. I sat down at a table with five men of varying ages and I felt very alone and fearful. What would these men think of me? It wasn’t until the meeting progressed and these men around me started sharing their thoughts and feelings about working their SA program that I began a slow journey towards being able to view men as people rather than as objects.

Hi Mike, thanks for your time today in sharing your experience, strength and hope. Could we begin by asking your sobriety date and home group?
Yes, June 3, 1984 and the Holy Innocents group in Chicago. For a long time previously it was at St. Teresa. We have been on Zoom for about a year now; when we were face to face, attendance was around 55-60 and we meet for 90 minutes.

In February 1995 an Irish SA member living in the USA, was informed by a friend of another “S Fellowship’’ meeting in Galway. He carried the following message to that meeting: “You are all newcomers. You will only relapse back into your disease unless you get a sponsor, make calls and have fellowship after the meetings.”

The first characteristic that makes face-to-face meetings attractive for me is openness and honesty. During the meetings there is an “evil monkey” inside my head, constantly whispering to me, telling me how different I should be to the person that I am, whom I should compare myself to, and what other people think of me. But I am not the person the monkey describes.

When I think of meetings, I think of something that my sponsor said early in our relationship: “Recovery in SA is like a three-legged stool, you have to have a sponsor, the Steps and the fellowship in order for the stool to remain standing.” Meetings are where the fellowship happens.

When I came to SA in 2006, we were holding the meetings in the building of a foundation where a fellow member worked, but soon after it closed and we had to move. For about a year we were meeting in a park, sometimes in the rain, sometimes in the sun. Then we moved to the garage of another foundation, which also closed its doors soon thereafter.

Two months ago, a member told me that several members of our fellowship were angry with me. I told the situation in a very long audio message to my sponsor. He suggested to me to shut up for a while and to not speak in meetings. He also told me that he had experienced that himself, which had been a very enriching experience for him.

When I hit my bottom on April 16, 2014, I didn’t know if my wife would stay with me after I disclosed to her my double life between my family and my secret lust garden. I was not only mentally and spiritually sick but also physically ill because of acting-in. I suffered from terrible pain.

I have no doubt that if every SA meeting was conducted along the lines as prescribed in our White Book (185-187), our fellowship would have thousands of strong meetings globally and many, many thousands of members with strong recovery.

There I was sitting at an AA meeting in early Feb ‘84, when a man announced he was starting an SA group in Nashville, TN. I surrendered six weeks later when I met at his apartment for my first SA meeting. Soon we outgrew his apartment and moved to my office building.