Alcoholics Anonymous ended his bad trips, convention delegate says

By Joe Friesen ~ The Globe and Mail ~ Saturday, July 2, 2005

Before he joined Alcoholics Anonymous, Murray dreamed of travelling. In his drinking days, he says jokingly, his longest trips involved falling from the bar stool to the floor.

Now, as Alcoholics Anonymous celebrates its 70th anniversary in Toronto, Murray, who has travelled through Europe, Asia and South America on behalf of AA, has the pleasure of welcoming the first delegates from Mongolia to attend a world convention.

Last year, Murray, who lives in Thunder Bay, Ont., brought the only Mongolian translations of AA's Big Book, the 12-step liturgy, to the former Soviet satellite.

He said that as the books were being passed out in the large canvas tent where the AA meeting was held, shouts of joy erupted when the assembled alcoholics saw the Mongolian script.

"That's how hungry they were for some literature," Murray said.

Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, alcohol was cheap and widely available in Mongolia, he said.

As the country liberalized in the 1990s, vodka and other popular drinks became more expensive, and those who had grown dependent on them turned to crime to feed their addiction.

"There was no stigma attached to alcoholism there. They were seen as poor Mongolians who had fallen victim to the Russian sickness, so once a way out was presented [in the form of AA], they looked into it."

The Mongolian government sent a group of doctors to the United States in 1997 to study their addiction-treatment programs, and then imported AA to Mongolia. There are now 42 groups in Mongolia, even though the size of the country and the nomadic life of its animal herders make it difficult to get to meetings.

The groups range in size from gatherings of two or three in the desert of the mountain steppe, to full meetings of 20 in the capital, Ulaanbaatar.

Murray remembers one meeting in the old Mongolian capital of Kharakorum. Everyone sat in rows inside a large tent, and although he couldn't speak the language, it wasn't long before he understood what they were saying.

"They were telling story after story about what it was like when they were drunk," Murray said.

"I didn't need to know the words to know what they were saying."

It's that kind of instant understanding that creates such a feeling of goodwill in AA.

Murray explains it as the joy that comes with being given one's life back. At 57, he's been sober for 23 years. But until he was 34, he was a drunk.

He worked as a teacher at a community college and every day at 3 p.m., he would head to the local bar. He could rarely remember what happened after that, and developed a habit of checking his pockets every morning for matchbooks taken from hotel bars to help piece together his movements.

As more than 40,000 people, according to conference estimates, stream through the Metro Convention Centre, there's an overwhelming sense of fellowship among strangers. Men and women dressed in red shirts shake hands with everyone in sight, welcoming them to Toronto and greeting them by their first name. Delegates wear their names on cards hung around their necks, and in AA everyone goes by their first name to protect their anonymity.

The crowd is mostly white, middle-class and populated mainly with American delegates. But there are a few far-off countries represented. China and Cuba, like Mongolia, are making their first appearances at a world conference. The conferences are held every five years and offer discussion groups such as: Pain: The Touchstone of Growth; Carrying The Message into Correctional Facilities; and Young People in AA: We Hit Bottom Too.