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Source: 1990 Seattle International Convention – Unknown Speaker – HOW AA BEGAN IN LATIN AMERICA – RS 17644.mp3 File: 1990-seattle-international-convention-unknown-speaker-how-aa-began-in-latin-america-rs-17644.mp3 Duration: 01:08:41
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Alcoholics Anonymous, Al-Anon and Alateen presents its international convention, 55 years, one day at a time, July 5th through the 8th, 1990, in Seattle, Washington. So, this is a topic that is very, very close to my heart. I also had the privilege of serving at your general service office as a staff member for 10 years, between 1968 and 1978. And at this time was when all the service boards and the service structure in Latin America and in Spain started to blossom out.
AA drifted down to Latin America in the early 40s. Travelers from the United States came down and tried to carry the message and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. And in the early 50s, the groups started to grow. There was a very important AA member from California. His name was Eddie F. And Eddie married an American gal, a Salvadorian gal, and they went back to El Salvador. And Eddie had been sober for several years. And he got to El Salvador and it was like an avalanche.
He carried the message throughout all Central America. And the groups there grew like mushrooms. And in Central America, they called him Mr. Eddie. And they considered him, the AAs in Central America, considered him the same as we consider Bill, because he was their founder and he was a very, very hard worker. And when he died, there were more than 20,000 people at his funeral. He was beloved. That was one way of the message arriving in Latin America.
Another way was through correspondence in Argentina. There was a man by the name of Hector who was in correspondence with one of the staff members at GSO with Ann. And they corresponded for many years. And that's how AA started in Argentina. And it grew in leaps and bounds also. In the late 50s, early 60s, as the groups grew, there was the need for more communication between all these groups. So the literature became a very, very important thing to have all our AA literature translated into Spanish.
There had been translations at the beginning. In Puerto Rico, they had translated the big book. In Mexico, in El Salvador, and in Colombia, they had also done some translations. But each one had done their own sort of in their own country. And although Spanish is the common language throughout Latin America, only Brazil, it's Portuguese, but the other countries are Spanish, there are differences in each country in words, the meaning of words. So when I went to work at the General Service Office, there were 17 versions of the 12 steps.
I was able to collect 17 versions. And it was very important, like in the fifth step, instead of the word admitted, they used other words, which made it very serious, very religious. The change of words could change the whole meaning of the steps. So throughout the work of committees and throughout the work with all the general service boards as they were created throughout Latin America, we were able to get to one version, not only in the steps, the traditions, and all the literature, but all the literature, all our service work, everything, and even the Box 459.
It's all published in one version of the translation. So there is no mistakes. There's no differences of opinion. It's much easier for AA to grow. Without any further ado from me, I would like to introduce the first member of our panel. I just met him five minutes ago. I didn't even know he was going to be here. I was told he could not get here from Spain. But he's here, and I know you will enjoy what he has to tell us about how AA is growing and how it grew in Spain. Roy?
Hi, everybody. My name is Roy and I'm an alcoholic. My home group is Ali County International in Spain on the Costa Blanca, and this is my first visit to America, my first international convention.
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And I am delighted to be here. Friends, I am delighted to be alive today. I am an Englishman. That is why I speak good English. When I first came here and I went to register, of course I sent my registration from my home in Spain. And it says Ali County, Spain on it. And I thought maybe I should change it. Because I'm English and people tell me I look like an Australian and all these sort of things, I certainly don't look like a Spaniard. My Spanish also is less than fluent, I'm afraid, but I'm working on that.
I then decided that I would not change it because it would be a very good talking point anyway. But this wonderful event, friends, you don't need talking points here, do you? Because you can talk without words here. But I've kept Ali County, Spain on my ticket because that's where I have my AA now. And that is continuing the process of keeping me alive that started back in England when this beautiful, wonderful fellowship came and got me from the very, very brink of horrors that I can't begin to imagine.
I drank for most of my teenage and adult life. I now know from what I've learned from this fellowship that I drank alcoholically from the very start. At the time, I thought I was doing what all the boys did, what all the macho things were to drink and getting into trouble. And you totted up how many times the police had your name in their books as a measure of your standing as a man. And I lived my sick life like that through many, many years. I enjoyed or I thought I enjoyed long tracts of it, long periods when for some reason I didn't get into trouble.
But the inevitability of the disease which I have took me to trouble time and time and time again. I destroyed marriages, families, relationships. My health, surprisingly enough, held up, but that's another miracle. And I hung on just about to the material things which I had, which in those days were important to me. My soul was a vacuum. I had the money to feed my habits. I had the car, which I tried time and time again to use as a murder weapon.
When I couldn't even remember driving it. My belief in my God, my higher power is such that I am convinced now that he very often put the brakes on to stop me killing somebody else when I didn't know what I was doing. I don't need to tell you too much about drinking because that's why you're here. We're all the same. I don't need to tell you how much I drank and how many times the police asked me to do this. Ask me. Nobody asked me to do anything. I was always told with my arm behind my back.
I don't need to tell you how many times that I woke to wonder which bed I was in, which house I was in, where my car was, who I was. At the end of all this, the rapid, rapid slide towards the end left me hanging on by my very fingernails to the things that I then thought were important. The means to make the money to pour alcohol down my throat. The means to make the money to get an even bigger, better murder weapon to drive around in. And the means to make the money to feed my ego in a thousand other ways.
Clothes, possessions. And as my ego grew and my public image, false as it was, grew. So the hole inside me grew also. And I drank to try and fill that hole. And I drank more and more and more frequently and more frequently. Until the day that I looked in the mirror. And Roy did not look back. The person to look back at me in that mirror was a stranger. It's true to say that I made the phone call.
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I made the phone call that connected me with Alcoholics Anonymous. Yes, I did it. I actually dialed a number. But from then on, I firmly believe that I had nothing further to do with it. God and this fellowship came for me and took me in. And they cured me with the toughest love I've ever come across. In those days, a suggestion was of no help to me. For 40 years, I wouldn't do anything that anybody told me, let alone anything that anybody suggested. So my friends who loved me back to life, back to health, told me what I needed to do to do my part of the bargain.
And for the first time in all those 40 odd years, I did it. I did what I was told. I amazed myself. I couldn't believe that I would do that. But I was beaten. I had it. I'd finished. And I'd lost hope. The reason I picked that phone up to ring this fellowship was that I did not know what to do next. I didn't know how to live. I didn't know how to die. I was too scared to try and die. And that's what prompted me to pick the phone up. And from then on, it was taken out of my hands.
And today, I haven't wanted or needed a drink or have taken one. And not from the day that I entered this fellowship. And that also is nothing to do with me whatsoever. But in other areas, I had to learn to catch up with those years that I lost. I lost those years of growing, of maturing. The emotional growing up process eluded me. It all went down my throat. I had to learn from what this fellowship and from what you people and from the people who started 55 years ago what we now celebrate and that I love.
I had to learn to catch up what I lost. They told me it will get better. And it has. Well, somebody once said to me, but it doesn't get easier. And I thought, oh, that's just a phrase. By God, he was right. It doesn't get any easier. But it does get better. Definitely better. I thought that my not drinking for one day or one hour at the beginning, which I had to do, was a miracle. And now I stand here in Seattle, in the USA, representing my adopted country of residence at an international convention.
And I remember that day that I looked in the mirror and saw a stranger looking back. Friends, that is the biggest miracle that anybody could ever imagine. I've had highs and lows in sobriety. Great fun. Great depressions, great sadnesses. No major disasters, I suppose. But things that would always have made me run to the bottle so that I didn't look as if I was being hurt by what had happened to me.
As if I was being hurt by what had happened to me, that I was strong in the case of a family
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death or a family disaster or somebody else's loss, that my ego as I saw it, which was necessary to be the strong hard man, would be bolstered. I would never let out what was in me. And alcohol dissolved that eventually into that hole. So eventually I got sober with the help of this fellowship. And I'd visited Spain quite a lot over the years and I enjoyed it. I had a house there. And I gradually found myself going on and on, wanting to be more in Spain than in the United Kingdom, in England. So I looked at the possibilities of getting work in Spain and really just practical possibilities and practical realities of making a move, which of some quite magnitude really, quite a big move for me. One of the major things, if not the major thing, I would say the major thing was the fact that not only did I find AA in Spain, but that I found then when I moved to Spain, my Spanish was practically nil. It's not much better now, I'm afraid, but it's better than it was then. I found that there were English speaking groups, there were groups which had access to multilingual translators, AA members, who could translate Spanish, English, German, English, German, Spanish, Dutch, Norwegian, French. And from that has come a situation in Spain where not only is there a full and ever-growing network of Spanish speaking AA groups, but also the international groups cater for foreign residents, visitors, of long or shortest days. When I got the letter from GSO to my home in Spain to ask me to speak here, I thought, well, this has got to be a mistake. They are writing to an Englishman who's lived in Spain for a year, less than a year then, to ask him to speak on the history of AA. And then on due reflection I thought, well, no, that's Alcoholics Anonymous, that sounds about right.
So I looked at the situation, I cannot speak, obviously, from my own personal experience of the birth and growth of AA in Spain, because I wasn't there. But what I have done, what I started to do before, there was a hitch, and Mary's told you that at one time I wasn't going to be able to come here. But somebody thinks I should be here, so here I am. That hitch went away, and I continued just a little bit of research where I found service manuals, I talked to people, and I got as much information as I could from the very early days. And there is a gap, I could only get to about 1980, to the date of the first conference in Spain.
And then there's a gap, but I can assure you from 1980 to the present day, AA is growing in Spain, so we just have to leave it at that. In 1959, apparently, a suffering alcoholic was in some sort of institution in Gran Canaria, and he got hold of a booklet about AA from somewhere, nobody seems to know what it was or where it was from, and was fired by the message and got in touch with GSO and got as much information as he could into Spain.
This was a little earlier than I think Mary was sending stuff over, but somehow they got information into Spain, and the first mainland base was in Malaga. And from thence it spread over the next few years, further into the mainland of Spain, and was mainly based in the north. There were periods of not much activity, with groups being very, very isolated, but a lot of people in Spain had the idea that they wanted to form some sort of organized structure, some sort of unity. Two or three attempts in the early 70s were made to try and do this. Poor attendances, lack of enthusiasm, and that sort of thing made people lose their
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drive and lose the early sort of enthusiasm to start a unified structure. In the middle 70s, things started to improve. There were about 50 groups in Spain, and the drive to become unified and to have a proper structured basis became stronger. In about 76, there were moves afoot to move what represented a general service office down in Malaga into either into Madrid or into Aviles, and they couldn't reach an agreement. That's not like alcoholics, is it? They couldn't reach an agreement at the first meeting, so they deferred it to October 76, or thereabouts, and had another go. And it was moved to the north of Spain, where the head office in Spain is still in Asturias. Various groups then had representative meetings in areas. The areas then were 12 in number. And these meetings were rather hit and miss, rather sporadic, until eventually the area was then further divided. The 12 areas became the main areas of north, east, south, and central. Plans were then made to try and get the first conference going. A president of the provisional committee was elected, and he was asked to legalise the presence of AA in Spain, which was duly done, and news came through from the ministry at a meeting on the 43rd anniversary of AA in 1978. From then on, things went quite quickly. Public meetings were held with a lot of interest, a lot of attendance, and AA grew and grew, until eventually the first conference was scheduled for the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th of April in 1980. I wasn't around then, and I'm afraid that I wasn't able to find out where the conference was held, but it happened. And the theme then was to serve united to grow. And friends, if nothing else, I'm here, and I can say to you here and now that AA in Spain has grown. There are now 276 AA groups in Spain. The area is further divided into 17, not 12. The acceptance of the principles and the message are more widespread than ever before. And certainly from my point of view, because I am closely involved, obviously, with the international aspect, with visitors, expatriate residents, that grows. My sponsor in Spain divides his time between attending Spanish groups and international groups, and his experience in the Spanish groups is that the Spanish-speaking groups are also growing very strongly. Our national conference this year is going to be in Gandia, which is very, very close to me, and I'm very much looking forward to the 14th of October this year, when I can get up there. The 10 years between 80 and 90 this year, to me personally, are still a mystery, because I'm afraid I haven't been able to find out what's been going on in detail. But the trend is upwards and sideways. The message is spreading, and I, for one, thank God that AA is like that in Spain. I need you people.
I need you so badly to keep me sober and to give me that hope of that most precious gift which was given to me the day that I walked into one of these rooms. I cannot begin to tell you the charge that I got on Thursday morning when I finally surfaced from a bit of sleep after 23 hours travelling from Alicante, and I walked to the conference
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centre with the needle as my sort of landmark. They said, you can't miss it, it's just aim for that needle up there. And I did this. And as I walked down through the grounds here at the centre, I saw everybody around with all these badges. I've now got one of these, you see, and they're all saying, hi there, hi, how are you? And I thought, and I went quicker and quicker and quicker. I wanted my badge. This is one material possession I really did want. And as I got nearer to the registration centre, just around the corner here, the atmosphere, I could taste it, and I got charged up and charged up and charged up. And friends, I'm still on that high. I'm nervous as hell talking to you here, but I'm so pleased to be here. It's a privilege and a pleasure to be a part of this absolutely wonderful fellowship. It's a privilege and a pleasure to be asked to speak to you all this afternoon. I'm so pleased that my problems were adjusted by somebody so that I could get here. I thank you all, every member of this fellowship everywhere, you people in particular who are here this afternoon, and everybody who attends any meeting or any gathering where I am, for helping to keep me sober and give me the hope of staying alive.
I love you all, and God bless. Hasta la vista. Thank you very, very much, Roy. I'm so glad you were able to get here. And like you, from 1980 on, I don't know anything about the history of Spain, so we better get busy and find out so we don't have that gap there. Our next speaker is from Colombia, and he comes from the same city where my family lives. I had met him some time ago, but I had not seen him in many years. And it was just a joy to ask him, well, when did you leave Colombia, and what's happening, and are there any more bombs, and all these things that are happening in that country. And he said, well, I haven't heard anything since Monday. And I said, well, I'm in the same situation. I talked to my family on Tuesday. So it's a pleasure for me to give you Ivan.
Thank you, Marielle. My name is Ivan, and I am an alcoholic. You will excuse me for my English, because it's very hard for me to go after a British man who knows very much English, and I am just a foreigner here with a little of English. I used to be Ivan the Terrible, but now I don't think I am anymore Ivan the Terrible. In 1959, the middle 50s, I was going to an American university, the University of Illinois, and I was already drinking like mad. But in my staying here in the United States, I've heard and I read something about the E.A. in the papers. I never thought it was for me. Maybe it was for my uncles, who were drinking so much. But I knew that there was a solution for alcoholism by that time. More or less at the same time, in the middle 50s, a man from a city in the coast of Colombia called Alejandro was in his struggle to control his way of drinking.
He knew that something was happening in the United States about alcoholism, and he decided to find out, maybe if my memory doesn't fail, he was in one of the hospitals of Miami trying to recover one of his drunks, drunkness. And he knew that there was, they were starting with a solution here in the United States. He got in touch with the General Service Office of New York,
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and he went to Colombia with some ideas, some literature, and some good intentions. His alcoholism was so strong that he had bought a sort of cage, iron cage, to lock himself when he was drinking in order to be able to stop drinking. So when he came from the United States and went to his city again, he went to hospitals to find somebody to help, another alcoholic, same thing as Bill did with Dr. Bob in Akron.
And he found a man, Arturo, who was from my city, and he was living there in Barranquilla, the city of the coast. And they started to talk, initiated a group there, which is still meeting. It was maybe 1955, maybe 1956, I don't remember exactly the dates. But I was drinking here at the University of Illinois like mad. Arturo lived in Barranquilla for a time, for a while, and then he went to Medellín.
And when living there, he decided to find some alcoholics to pass the message, the things he knew about the recovery of alcoholism. And he made something like a public meeting, and he found Darío. And with Darío, they started a group in Medellín. Darío still lives. Arturo died, and Alejandro died. And they founded this group in Medellín, and it started growing that way in Colombia. Here, Arturo and some of the earlier alcoholics were very active workers, and they decided to initiate, to start with a service office, which I think was a very good idea, because I know some other countries, like Peru, where the message came at the same time, and AA has not grown so much.
And I think the reason we grew better than in Peru is because we decided to start the general service office. So they asked New York for help, and New York started to send literature, and they sent even an AA trustee to Medellín to see how things were there, and to start with a literature-selling center, let's say it that way. In 1964, they started with the general service office, and they met in the first conference.
Today we have about 652 groups, half of them in the small cities and about half of them in the big cities. So we can say that we have about a group in every two cities of the country, every two towns of the country. In recovery, I think there might be about 15,000 alcoholics that go to the groups, and about 20,000 alcoholics that have recovered, but they don't go too much to the groups. Myself, to keep going with the story that I started in Illinois, I went to Colombia to do the things a young man was supposed to do, start with a professional career, I am a civil engineer, get married, do all these things, and drink.
Because for me, it was very difficult to try to appear to look like a normal person, working, be an executive, get married, and all those things. And besides that, to be needing drinking, to need to drink or to have to drink all the time. Because since I drank my first cup, I think I have the compulsion, this physical allergy they mention in the book, because that first time, when I was about 14 years old, I drank the whole bottle, and I ended up on the floor drunk, and throwing out all the things I have to drink.
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And since then, to my arrival to AA, I drank for 26 years. At the beginning, I thought I was a social drinker, because in spite of drinking so much, I apparently was clear in my mind, I could do the things I wanted, I could drive the car, I didn't have accidents. So, I was learning how to drink, and drank a lot. Then at the end of my alcoholic drinking career, I was drunk with 2 or 3 cups. I didn't want to stop, I drank for days and days.
So I decided I had to go to a meeting, I knew AA, I knew some persons that were going to AA, I guessed, because I never asked them. And I went to my first meeting. When they said there, at my first meeting, that my name is John Doe, and I have 4 months, and my name is Peter, and I have 1 year of sobriety, I didn't believe that. It was too long for me, because at the end, 8 days or 10 days or 15 days without drinking was a very impossible problem for me.
I couldn't stop drinking for more than a week. So I sat down there at the meetings, I went to the meetings with the idea of controlling my drinking way of thinking. I didn't want to quit. I knew that they were selling me the truth, but maybe that was not for me yet. So I kept going to the meetings and drinking. At the end of this period of time, maybe 1 or 2 years, I decided I would do what AA was offering me without any opposition.
And I think that was my best thought in my life. Because when I said in a meeting for the first time, truly, that my name is Ivan and I am an alcoholic, I think I was telling the first truth in my life. All the things in the past I think were something like a nightmare. But when I said I am an alcoholic, I was telling the truth, I was starting to tell the truth. It was very difficult for me, because I couldn't speak in any meeting.
Many meetings I went, 3 or 4 months, and I was thinking about speaking and telling something, because I wanted to tell something of my problems. And I couldn't speak, I was so shy that I couldn't speak. And here I am speaking to you in English, so I think I have changed. What was my secret? I think, as I said, I believed that these things were for me. I believed everything they told me in the 12 steps.
And I believed that everything they said, it would happen as they said, without any opposition. I have my spiritual awareness, my spiritual experience. I didn't have God at the beginning. I was a rebel of God. But when I decided to do the things I should do, following the steps and all these things, and I didn't believe, I was not drinking water, I was not believing in this. I thought it was some kind of indoctrination, maybe I was hypnotized, so I doubt.
And I felt one day in my life, at the beginning, that there was a God because he showed to me something like Bill felt in his experience in the big book. He showed to me and he told me in some kind of communication with our words, this is true, keep going, you are with me. And the proof you are with me is that you are feeling right now like going out your spirit, going out of your body.
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This happened to me like floating in the air. Communication with our words, something I never had before. So I have to believe. And I decided to work as much in AIA as I could to correspond with God and with my friends in AIA that hired me. To correspond with them to the things they have given me. And they asked me very soon, because I spoke some English, to help them to translate some of the literature we have there in Colombia.
That was very good for me because it obliged me, made me read in detail all this literature and learn a lot about the program. That was very good. So, helping them, they asked me someday to be a trustee, I was a trustee. In Colombia, the general service office was adapted the way they thought it should be. They, at the beginning, didn't have too much literature, they didn't have the service manual or things like that.
So when they found that with the service manual and the 12 traditions and all the things, they have some little mistakes there, I tried to correct them and to show them that we should follow more closely the experience of the AIAs in the world, especially in the 12 traditions and 12 concepts of service, that we should start with the trustees to organize the general service as much as we could. So they fired me and they kicked me out in a conference.
So I had to went to the group again and be there. I didn't want to be an angry old man, how they say in the tradition, a resented old man. I wanted to be there and work. And here I am. In this wonderful convention, when I was at the beginning of my recovery, reading about the AIA and trying to translate some of the books, I was reading AIA comes on age and I always dreamed to come here one day and to know the places of AIA in the United States.
And this dream came true when someday my friends, AIAs in Colombia, invited me to come to the AIA service meeting in New York. So I had the great pleasure of going to Stepping Stones and visiting Bill's place. And Lois was alive. She was so nice. I still remember. Then we went to Akron to know the place of Dr. Bobbs. It was wonderful. Everything is wonderful. And then I always dreamed to come to a convention.
And here I am in the convention with all this. Hi to everybody. Being very proud of having the badge so we can say hello to everybody. And to be with you, I thank very much the organizers of the convention that invited me to speak to you. And this is in my poor English some of my experience with the AIA and the AIAs in Colombia. Thank you. Thank you very much, Ivan. I was just thinking one of the advantages of growing old is to have known people like Arturo.
He was a co-founder or the founder of AIA in Colombia. He was a wonderful, wonderful man. Our next speaker is from Brazil. Brazil is a fantastic country. I had the privilege of going there for the GSO office on a trip. And when I arrived at the airport in Rio, I was just thinking I hadn't thought of this in a long time. I entered the airport and there was a red carpet. And I sort of looked around to see, you know, who the red carpet was for.
Well, it was for this alcoholic. And her name happened to be Isis. And she certainly looked. She looked just like an Egyptian princess. She was dressed like an Egyptian. And I think she sort of acted like an Egyptian. And I really didn't know what was expected of me, you know. But being AIA, I just thought, well, relax, turn it over, the higher power will take care of you. I do not speak Portuguese.
So I just kept telling them. So I just kept telling them, slowly, and I'll understand you, and you'll understand me. And after a couple of hours, I felt completely at home.
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On that trip, I did not have the pleasure of meeting Joaquin, but I will now, and I'll give you our next speaker, Joaquin. I'm sorry, it's Ignacio. Hi, people. First of all, I beg your apology for my English. It is actually a kind of Portuguese English, mixed English and Portuguese. My poor vocabulary, perhaps I couldn't express myself correctly, and I had the hard task of putting the right preposition in the right place, or the right preposition at the right place, on the right place, I don't know.
They gave me headaches the last two days when I was preparing this job. My name is Joaquin Nasso. I'm an alcoholic. I'm thankful to God for having given me the last 24 hours of sobriety. Thanks to AA, I'm not a drunk anymore. My personal alcoholic story is similar to those we hear every day at our group meetings, so I will not repeat it. What matters to me is my sobriety and how I'm reaching it. I like to remind my early days in AA when, after four months of a business, I had a slip.
At that time, my personal problems seemed to crush me, and I almost couldn't tolerate it. But I did know about the literature. The group where I started was poor in this matter. However, there was a book, The Twelve Steps, which I found accidentally the day I restarted, July 23, 1973, when, by a mistake of the group, I was elected Secretary of Correspondence, a kind of GSR of our days, and was trying to do the job after the meeting.
Then I took the book and started the actual AA recovery program. Step by step, day at a time, my life began to change, and I decided to deliver my will and my life to the care of God and began to be judge of myself instead of the others. As a consequence, The Twelve Steps threw me to the Third Legacy Service after many prayers and meditations suggested by the 11th. Then I was charged with many representations in AA, since GSR to State Delegate, Secretary of our General Service Board, and Brazilian World Service Meeting Delegate.
Now I came back to the origins and became, with such a proud, not recommendable in AA, the GSR of my group in Porto Alegre. Well, let me give you a brief history of AA in Brazil and how it is now, which is more significant than my own story. History. The first notice we have about AA in Brazil turns back to 1945, when an AA member proceeding from USA, named Lynn Codale, changed some correspondence with the Alcoholic Foundation, but didn't flourish that contact.
Another American fellow, Herbert D., known in Brazil as Herbie, arrives to Rio de Janeiro one year later, and a search of the first contact, Lynn, is unsuccessful. However, he kept correspondence with the Alcoholic Foundation, which sent to him curious requests to carry on the message. As from Rio de Janeiro to Recife, about 2,500 kilometers, or 1,500 miles far away, but instead sober. There is a time between that happenings.
There are no registrations, but there is a letter published in October 1947, probably sent by Herbie,
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in a high-circulation newspaper from Rio de Janeiro, O Globo, where the principles of our fellowship are clearly explained, and finish inviting interested persons to write through the same newspaper to the Brazilian AA nucleus. Our Herb followed carrying on the message. We have a story from one of his sponsors, known between us as Harold W., who details his first contact made through a request of a translation to Portuguese of an AA pamphlet about the 12 steps.
The Brazilian AA memory registered 10 sober members in the spring of 1949 at Grupo Rio de Janeiro, which succeeded the AA Rio nucleus, and whose secretary was Harold W. 16 fellows in 1950, and 30 recovered alcoholics in 1951. The more significant information we found at Central Group in Rio de Janeiro, which works until now, and it was established in February 1952. At that time, six members celebrated sobriety anniversaries.
It is interesting to mention here that five years later, January 1957 and August 1958, we had regular groups established in Maranhão and Alagoas, northeast of Brazil. In the sixth decade, we found AA groups in the states of Minas Gerais, Pernambuco, Paraíba, São Paulo, Santa Catarina, Ceará, Paraná, Goiás, and Distrito Federal, Brasília, and reached, in the following decade, all the points of our large nation, since Rio Grande do Sul until Bahia, Amazonas, Sergipe, and Rondônia.
Events Our Brazilian AA archives tell us of the first national meeting in 1963 at Rio de Janeiro. However, there is a large interval till new shares of experience behold. Only in 1974, 1975, and 1976, São Paulo hosts our fellowship in national conventions, an appropriated name named at that time Conclaves. The success of those experiences followed with two more conventions, then in Recife, Pernambuco in 1977, Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais in 1978.
Mariana probably knows all these places. After this, the national convention was included in the General Service Board calendar and took place two years in different sites with renewable success as follows. 1988 Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, 1982 Fortaleza, Ceará, 1984 Blumenau, Santa Catarina, 1986 João Pessoa, Paraíba, 1988 Curitiba, Paraná, and 1990 Belém, Pará this year. That's a pity we don't have a map to show the distance here and understand all this.
We have to mention as important even, also in Brazilian AA history, the creation in 1969 of our Literature Distribution Center, CLAAB, with the support of AA World Service and its General Service Office, which published the basic books, Alcoholics Anonymous, Twelve Steps, and Twelve Traditions. This contributed to a wonderful growth of AA in Brazil in the following years. Another landmark was the support of professionals on the alcoholics field, even in the 60s, especially doctors all around the country.
They sent to us many prominent drunks, who are today our fellow fellows with gratitude. We cannot forget also the contribution of clergy and social assistants, who always bring support to us, to the country. As you can see, the history of AA is rewritten.
[00:55:00]
We couldn't grow up without the help of non-alcoholic friends. We point out yet the handle of Guidelines and Box 459 in the 70s, gently sent by GSO in Spanish, distinct from Mary Ellinger, which encouraged the establishment of several central offices and intergroups, developing all public information affairs. Finally, we'd like to register the second Ibero-American meeting that took place in Brasilia as part of a recommendation from the World Service Meeting 1978, which enriched our experience and legacies, thanks to the contribution from our Latin American brothers.
General Service Structure The first step was given at Rio de Janeiro, the AA Brazilian cradle, where was established a national office known as ANSA, which worked for several years and was responsible for the edition of a pamphlet about the AA program, named Livro Branco, White Book. In spite of its efforts to help the growth of our fellowship, it was unsuccessful because there were no representatives of our national group conscience.
A new and well-succeeded approach was made in 1974, through the revision of the Literature Distribution Center Club by-laws, enabling the first state delegates to be seated on the new Club Board of Directors. This Board of Directors meeting in 1976, by then consisting of 24 delegates, which represented 16 of Brazil's states, became our General Service Board, which took the responsibility for the unity of AA in Brazil.
The Club then undertook the General Service Affairs, together with the print and distribution of literature. In the same year, our Board sent the two first World Service Meeting delegates to New York, in October 1976, one representing the Board and the other its General Service Office, complying a recommendation from the World Service Meeting. The participation of Brazil at the fourth World Service Meeting gave us a wonderful contribution to the early days of our General Service structure.
Our first General Service Conference, for instance, had the same World Service Meeting committees and issued 30 recommendations, well accepted by groups and AA members throughout the country. Through these recommendations, we could feel the preoccupation to encourage the participation of the groups and offices by electing its GSRs. Today, we scarcely know about a group in Brazil who don't have a General Service representative.
As a consequence, our General Service structure matured. Once each year takes place our General Service Conference at the sites of our GSO, São Paulo, and the sites of national conventions. The last one was held in Belém, Pará, this year, and was the 14th. Today, thanks to this big job from our new leaders, we can inform that our General Service Board is composed by five non-alcoholics trustees, designated Class A, and ten alcoholics trustees with ten or more years of rights, designated Class B.
The Board structure has the Literature Distribution Center, CLAP, the General Service Office, now separated, and the AA Brazilian magazine, Vivencia, which reached the number 12 with excellent publishing matters and beautiful graphic composition for us. Thanks to the Portuguese language in which is printed, there is no threat to a decay of circulation. to a Decay of Circulation of the Magazine Del Mensaje, or The Grapevine, at all.
Of course, this comparison is just an encouragement to the people who makes our vivencia.
[01:00:03]
But it became an excellent link between our Brazilian AA, bringing us healthy change of experiences. We have also good communications from the Board and its office through a well-printed annual report named Apostila, which is distributed to all countries group, sharing the results of its own activities and from the last General Service Conference. On another hand, is a periodical publication from our General Service Office, the Bulletin Bob, which circulates with Inside AA Matters.
Bob. Finally, and for our gladness, the Club has at the disposal of AA in Brazil, nine books since the basic ones, Alcoholics Anonymous, Twelve and Twelve and Twelve, to AA Comes of Age, Living Sober, and our National Group Directory, plus 30 pamphlets of our conference-approved literature. Nowadays, our General Service Structure comprises plus 24 of our Area Committees, 171 District Committees, and 53 Central Office and Intergroups, working throughout the country.
We estimate now we have 2,900 groups and about 100,000 sober members in Brazil, but this is less than 1% of our probably alcoholic population. So there is much to do to carry on the AA message. AA is also present in 35 hospital regular groups, 13 in prisons, and 10 in other institutions. We have four special purpose groups, two being three for women and one for young fellows. Expectations and Preoccupations We verify a big preoccupation with the second legacy, unity, which can be reached through a better understanding of the forced tradition, once we well know the limits between the group autonomy and the matters which affect AA as a whole.
The brief addition of our General Service Manual, still approved by the General Service Conference, will bring us answers to all doubts about the tasks of each committee, office, and representatives, in order to attain in harmony our primary purpose. The conference is also stimulating the creation of more public information, cooperation with professionals and institution committees. This last one, through a recommendation, is asking for more talks and visits to hospitals, avoiding to start permanent groups, once the committee could reach a large number of hospitals without the risk of closing groups for a lack of workers.
Otherwise, the work in prisons is still timid, but many of us attribute it to our system, which is not favorable to the presence of our fellowship in prisons in Brazil. We expect a new increase of aid requests due to the recent publication of an article on a high-circulation Brazilian magazine, Veja, while there were some slips in our anonymity traditions, but the stories and the recovery basic principles of our fellowships are well stated.
This is a large circulation magazine in Brazil, with many, many subscriptions throughout the country. It was the first time they opened space for us. The miracles of healing. We have some fellows face-to-face about the problems of AA. What to do.
[01:05:07]
Also a book about alcohol and other drugs, written by a doctor, a friend of AA, Eduardo Mascarenhas, a famous psychiatrist in Brazil, will probably change the mind of many rich drunks and professionals in favor of our program. However, I will repeat my last words of the oral presentation of the Brazilian report to the first World Service meeting. Last year I had the honor of being one of the delegates. The difference now is that I am not a representative, but I feel it is the thoughts of our Brazilian AA members who are sharing experience with you here.
We have come here to learn. Alcoholism is an illness of the human being. It changes the language, the customs, the circumstances, but the stories are the same. So AA has no frontiers, and it is the only fellowship in the world that saves as it unifies and restores the faith, the hope, and the love. This is why we believe in recovery through the 12 steps. We believe in unity through the 12 traditions.
We believe in service through the 12 concepts to carry on the message to the still-suffering alcoholic. We in Brazil believe in Alcoholics Anonymous. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Joaquin Ignacio. I want to thank my friend Roy. I want to thank Ivan and Joaquin. You brought back many memories, and they showed us how AA has no boundaries, how we communicate through the language of the heart, like Bill used to say.
And when we travel all over the world, we know that there's always a place for us to go. We are privileged people. We don't have to look around for things to do. We know what we're going to do when we travel. We go to meet just friends that we have not met before. So we're never, never alone like we used to be when we were drinking. Thank you for being here today, and all of you who care to join us in the Lord's Prayer.
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever and ever. Amen. Keep coming back. Keep coming back. Thank you. You were wonderful. Thank you.
That concludes our program. Thanks for listening.