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Source: Unidentified Historical Recording – Fellowship Review Recording 917 – Date Unknown.mp3 File: riaz-j-carrying-the-message-nasac-johannesburg-2006.mp3 Duration: 00:17:44
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Hi friends, my name is Riaz and I am an addict. We are here because some day somebody from some group carried the message to each one of us and saved our lives. Everyday that I wake up I know that I am grateful to some group and some person from that group who saved my life and I am available to my life and my family and my friends because somebody made it their duty through an NA group to save my life and I would like us to observe a moment of silence in memory and gratitude to the one that carried the message to each of us and the group that existed to ensure we had a place to recover.
Thank you. I come from Pietermaritzburg in KwaZulu-Natal. My home group has four meetings. The reason we have four meetings is because we have chosen to work in a way that carries the message to all the addicts that suffer in our city. We started about six years ago and we had one meeting. It was the first meeting where all of us belonged and as we grew we felt we needed more meetings and we are now at the point where we have four meetings.
We all consider all four groups to be our home groups because most of us attend all of these meetings or two or three of these meetings and most of these meetings are located in the areas where we live and so I am very proud to be a member of this group. Like each of you the people who belong to this group are amazing people. You know for six years now there has never been a day that the doors have been closed. People like us with all the kind of problems we have had have managed to keep these doors open. There are institutions that have millions of rands, billions of rands, which will go there and their staff will not be at work, their offices will be shut and somebody has stolen the whole place. But as addicts in most places we have managed to keep open the doors and that is true of the place that I come from and I am extremely proud of all the meetings I go to. I sometimes get a chance to go to meetings in Joburg and Cape Town and all I rely on is a map that tells me where these meetings are and every time I have pitched up the doors have been open and it is as a result of addicts like you and me who have made it our duty to ensure that we carry the message. We keep the doors open because had somebody not done that for us we would not be here and if we don't do that for someone else they will not be here.
You know it kind of reminds me of Ubuntu. They say Ubuntu is the idea that people are people because of other people. I am in N.A. because of you. You are in N.A. because I am around and I didn't understand this when I first came to N.A. When I first came here they said to me it is a simple program and I thought well it must be simple if we are junkies and I didn't understand and I had a problem because I thought people were making us feel stupid. Today I am grateful that it is a simple program and that we have a primary purpose. I imagine sometimes if we were responsible for investigating the merchants, closing them down, arresting them, if we were responsible for providing rehabilitation, if we were responsible for providing support to the addicts families we would not have made it. Today I am grateful that we just have one primary purpose and that is to carry the message. If we had more than that none of us would have been able to get clean because the process of getting clean, staying clean and growing spiritually is enormous. It is taxing. It drains most of us of the energy that we have to grow a little more each day but it makes us better people and so I am grateful that there is just one primary purpose. There is just one thing that we have to do and that is to carry the message to the addict that still suffers.
I consider all of us to be addicts that still suffer because we have a chronic illness. The thing that I understand and the group that I come from, our view is that we have got to carry the message that addiction can be beaten one day at a time. We do recover
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and that our lives can become better provided that we practice the 12 steps of NA and that none of us need die without hearing the message of recovery. That is the universal message that we carry but that we have got to carry different messages to different addicts in recovery. As we grow, we no longer face, I know in our group we have to carry the message to the newcomer that all is well in this place, you are safe, we love you, we want you to recover and we are here for you. Everybody out there wants nothing to do with you, we are around and we are going to make sure you get through meeting and we are going to make sure you get home and we are going to keep you safe in terms of your recovery and that works with the newcomer but for somebody who is a few years clean, the message that we need to carry is that you are still an addict, your recovery is a lifelong process and that you need to grow spiritually, you need to recover from addiction when you first get here, then you need to recover in terms of your relationships with other people, you need to recover in terms of the other things that cause you to be addicted and cause you to be obsessive and compulsive and so we have recognised that the message we carry is a different message to addicts in different stages of their recovery and our meetings have got to be relevant for the newcomer as well as the person who keeps coming year after year after year after year because we need to carry that message to all of them and that is quite a complicated task, it requires lots of commitment, lots of service and I was sitting here and working out that if there are 30,000 NA meetings in the world every week there is at least 100,000 addicts across the world that are opening those meetings, sharing those meetings, making sure those meetings open and that is an amazing effort week after week after week for 50 years for hundreds of thousands of people to carry out and I am extremely proud to be an addict. Today when I say I am an addict I recognise that through the NA programme, through the message we carry, we are making a difference to the lives of addicts around us and that no addict need die because we are there to carry that simple message that recovery is possible. I will try to cover what I am saying as some of my stuff that I think and also I represent a group, I come from a group experience, carrying the message as part of that group experience and so I will also share on what we learn as a group. The group that I come from is located in a community that is made up of extreme poverty and extreme wealth, they are very wealthy people and they are very poor people and some of the people who come to our meetings needing recovery cannot even get to a meeting, do not even have a phone, do not even have a job yet they have families that they need to support and we have got to do all we can as a group to make sure the message of recovery reaches them and in our group for example we have had to make sure that there is a lift club that operates, that at the end of each meeting people in the meeting know how they are going home, they know who is picking them up and it has been addicts volunteering their time, their fuel, their vehicles for years and years and years to make sure somebody gets to a meeting. If there is no transport I know lots of people who needed to come to a meeting who would not be able to get to a meeting, not because they do not care but because they would not be able to walk 10 kilometres to the venue and in that kind of community, picking people up, phoning people, supporting them to get through meetings is absolutely critical, if it is not done there is no recovery and one has had to then give more of oneself and I have been amazed to see addicts in my group and other groups that I have been to going the extra mile, making sure that if I have got a car you have got a car, if you need to come to a meeting you will get to a meeting because you are the same as me. It is that love, that selflessness, that commitment that shows me that we are special, that we are recovering and with our recovery others must also recover and the other challenge we face in our own home group is that South Africa is still very much shaped in terms of where people live by our apartheid policies in the past, the community that I live in and go to meetings, most of the people generally look like me and most of the NA meetings are generally in the community where I come from but we committed ourselves to ensure that one day in our city there would be an NA meeting
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for all people and thus far we have opened one meeting in a place where everybody does not look like me, as part of our commitment to make sure that people get recovery wherever they are, that recovery is not necessarily just for certain people because there are addicts everywhere and they desperately need recovery. In our heads we have got a plan as a group that will achieve that in the next five years. We are not rushing, we are not doing things that make it unmanageable but we committed that every area in our city where people are living there will be an NA meeting and that everybody would then feel comfortable in those meetings because of where we come from as a nation and amazingly it is working.
We are probably two years away from opening a meeting in another community but from what I hear from my members I know that one day that meeting will open because they realise that our primary purpose is to carry the message to all the addicts no matter where they are and in terms of how we carry this message we do so through meetings. Our primary basis of carrying our message is through meetings. Our group has had the usual problems of addicts who we love to hear ourselves, we love for others to hear us and we can go on talking for a long period in the meeting but then that meeting is only about our message and not about everybody's message and so as a group we have decided that there is a limit in how long you can talk and that the chairperson will stop you so that everybody gets a chance to pass the message because we have said if we exist as NA, we open our meetings on time, we have got to then focus on our meetings being recovery environments, environments where the message can be shared and so everybody needs to be given a chance to speak, not just one person or not just two people or not just those people who like to talk. People know there are limits. We have also had to take the step at our meetings where members who are females who come for recovery are warned that there are people in the meetings who have a disease called addiction and one of its manifestations is sexual addictions and these people may end up as a result of that addiction harming you and therefore we need to be aware of this and we need to look at how this process is managed because we don't want the message to be given in an environment that is not safe. There should be no drugs, people should have an opportunity to speak but people should not fear being hunted or being sexual objects. So we have also felt that we need to take those kinds of steps in our meetings to ensure that the message of recovery is provided in an environment that protects all addicts and we have seen it work. We have seen a situation where people made major mistakes with regards to female addicts to a point where everybody is aware that they have an addiction and that this addiction can harm people. I am raising all of this because that has been our experience as we have tried to carry the message to the addict that still suffers. Our own experience as a group has also led us to adopt the policy that on a monthly basis we have a business meeting and at our business meeting we ask the question are we carrying the message properly? Are we reaching the addict? Are the newcomers remaining in our meetings? Are there people who are missing from these meetings? So that we [unclear word] the way we carry this message and I must tell you that over the last few months we have picked up very interesting things. For one, we used to do a clean time countdown and in our group you have at least eight people who have more from three to ten years clean and you have about five to ten guys who have less than a year, less than six months, less than two months and we discovered from the newcomers that when we did this clean time some of them felt very intimidated. They felt that the clean time countdown made them feel like they had a lot to achieve and that they had a lot of work to do and that we were better than them, meaning those who had lots of clean time and these were coming out from newcomers at our meeting and so we abandoned the ritual process of clean time countdown because we felt that it affected the way newcomers felt about
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Their Recovery, And People Have Become Happier That Now All We Do Is Check Have You Reached A Milestone, Rather Than Going Through The Process Of Showing Who Was Where In Terms Of Being Clean, But Through Having These Business Meetings, Through Being Open, Through Being Honest, We Have Looked At Ways Of Carrying The Message In The Most Effective Way Possible. We Have Had To Do That Because All Of Us When We Wake Up Every Day Are Grateful That There Is A Program Like NA, Grateful That Our Lives Were Saved One Day At A Time, Grateful That There Is A Meeting We Can Go To, But If We Want To Maintain All Of That And Improve All Of That, We Have Got To Look At How We Do It Better. We Have Got To Address Problems That Arise In That Recovery Environment. We Have Got Only One Purpose, That Is To Carry The Message And We Have Got To Do It To The Best Of Our Ability, Because An Addict Somewhere Is Going To Live Or Die As A Result Of The Way We Carry The Message. We Don'T Carry The Addict, But We Carry The Message And We Are Meant To Carry It In A Way That Makes People Feel Loved, Because Nobody Loves Us On The Outside. When I First Came In, When All Of You Came In, Most Of Us Were Not Wanted Because Of What We Did To Other People. And People Need To Feel Loved, They Need To Feel That This Is Their Home. And You Know, People Say That You Cannot Choose Your Family, You Can Choose Your Friends, But In NA, I Have Been Able To Choose My Family, I Have Been Able To Choose This Fellowship, I Have Been Able To Choose The People Who Belong To My Home Group, And I Have Been Able To Get Comfortable With Them. We Have Had Family Meetings Where We Talk About Our Stuff And We Sort Our Stuff Out And We Try And Make Our House As Good As Possible. And That Doesn'T Happen In Very Many Places. And What We Can Solve, We Hand Over To A Higher Power And I Have Looked Around And There Is Not Many Places Where This Is Done. So From Being Who We Were To Where We Now Has Been An Absolutely Amazing Journey. I Am Proud To Be A Member Of Narcotics Anonymous.
I Am Happy Knowing That There Are Hundreds Of Thousands Of Addicts Like Me Carrying The Message To The Addict That Still Suffers, Making Sure That No One Has To Die Who Needs Recovery. And I Think That The Experience I Have Had Has Been Like Nothing I Can Compare With And For The Rest Of My Life, I Am Grateful For What NA Gave Me And Therefore I Have A Lot To Give NA. Thank You.