[Letter dated July 28, 1994]

Hi, my name is Mike B. and I’m a sexaholic. I’m on the SA Service Structure Committee… With the help of other SA’s, a service structure was written and later adopted during the January 1994 Rochester Conference Business Meeting. The work we wrote is in the June 1994 Essay. As stated, the SA group is the basic unit of the SA structure which will be represented in the Intergroup. In Wichita there are seven groups; four are represented at a bi-monthly Intergroup meeting. Each representative has at least 6 months sobriety. Kansas and Oklahoma have had a retreat every fall and spring for around six years which meets in Wichita. We’ve decided to include the other states in our region in our retreat. I wrote SA central office for a list of contact persons in our region.… My thinking is two-fold: one, to build the cohesion in our region through the vehicle of bi-yearly retreats and two, to then move forward to the annual regional Assembly, made up of representatives from each intergroup.…

Getting to a retreat, conference, or service meeting may require driving a few miles. Getting a sponsor I need may require a long distance call. These are all things I’ve done and do to stay sober, involved, and to stay challenged and fed, according to my extreme appetite for life. I used to drive for hours to act out, and make long distance calls to act out. I’m trying to put as much time and energy and money into my recovery as I put into my addiction.

We may never see anyone at our retreat from outside Kansas and Oklahoma this fall, and the people who do service work today may be all the same folks who will be doing service work on a state, regional and national level forever. But, unless everyone in SA has a chance to come out of isolation and get involved, giving back what has been freely given to them, I’m going to keep striving for unity, communication and recovery in SA on a group, intergroup, regional and national level. Whether we like it or not, we’re in this together.

—M.B.

[Letter dated November 25, 1994]

… The efforts I described in that writing [above] paid off ten-fold, as evidenced at our retreat last weekend. It also helped Central Office update their list of contacts for our region. In addition, we had a meeting called, “Where do we go from here—Service Structure” at the retreat, which helped get the topic out for discussion and action was taken. It was decided that Intergroup Delegates would attend the Spring Retreat and have a Regional Assembly during the Spring Retreat.

—M.B.