2012, 08-20 AA in the Samoa’s! I haven't written much about my AA experience lately because there hasn't been any to speak of outside of me sitting down in the mornings to sip my tea and read a few pages of the Big Book or an old Grapevine and then read the days bit in my favorite God book before trying (usually not too successfully) to have a few minutes of meditation. All of French Polynesia turned out to be no mans land as far as meetings went and the closest I got to any recovery contact was a roaring drunk I met on the beach at a big cruisers party. The Cook Islands were no more productive though they may have meetings but our only stopped was at Suwarrow which is uninhabited. Then finally in American Samoa I had a contact email address for a member listed in my Loners & Internationalists Meeting Directory. I wrote and heard back right away! My first successful LIM contact from the directory I have been carrying around with me for the last ten thousand miles. The little gray book has contact info for members, pages of overseas meeting times and places and port contacts in numerous countries. The Mexico contacts listed were for places we never visited and the French Polynesian contacts were all out of date. “Willing to go to any length Kat....remember?” Surprise surprise, I sent off an email and it didn't bounce! In less than 24 hours I heard back from Toy. Unfortunately he was off island but he instantly forwarded my email on to another local contact and within another day I heard back from Iosepha. Yea, AA in Samoa!!!! What a luxury: four meetings in 15days plus a girls lunch with Leslie (the only woman AA on the island) and a dinner with the whole crew on Friday night at the Koko Bean -all five of us. Big bonus the meetings were relatively easy to get to, just a forty minute $1 bus ride followed by a $4 taxi ride to Hope House a hospital/retirement home where the group rents a room and a free ride back to the harbor with Iosepha. The group here is small but consistent with three regular members, one who bounces back and forth to the states and one who just moved off Island. Big bonus for me though is just a few weeks ago they held the first annual Samoa Round Up and camp out in Western Samoa so the members here have current email info and new friendships with the handful of AA's there which is where we head to next. They have one meeting a week and I already have contact telephone numbers and email addresses and directions to the meeting which is only a ten minute walk from the main harbor. I do wish my timing had been a bit better it would have been great to be part of the 1st annual round up. Oh well this is he next best thing. AA is obviously still small here in the islands but Social Services is activly sending new recruits though no one at the meetings is very sure exactly what leads to a referral and what the requirements actually are. They just welcome the folks who show up and try to carry a simple message explaining what AA is and what it isn't. One of the days I attended there were three men there two for their first time. Two sat quietly listening and joined in settin gup and putting away the banners and such the other...well...I felt pretty sorry for him. He sat next to me and is body language made it plain he would have rather been anywhere in the world but there with us. He shifted and wriggled, stared out the window with his body faced away from everyone else in the room. Every bit of him was trembling and tense and I swear if I had reached out and touched him he would have exploded out of the chair. He did stand and hold hands with us at the end of the meeting but the moment we dropped hands he fired out of the building as if his life depended on it. Surprisingly he returned two meetings later though he walked in just ten minutes before we closed the meeting and again disappeared without a trace before anyone could even speak to him. Who knows, when a seed is planted. It does seem like a long shot trying to get sober here. With only two meetings a week and such a small membership you would have to really want to stay sober to stick around long enough for the miracle to happen. I was struck once again at how lucky I was to find AA when I did and where I did. But then again this thing we do has been working all over the world now for many years -what is it nearly 80?- and all it takes is a desire to stop and two people in the same room. For that matter other LIM's have been doing it for a long time now too all alone and far away from “mainstream” AA. Thank you for being here….......................................I am so grateful. Kat