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The wonderful privilege to be able to come to a meeting like this and share my experience

strength and hope, knowing that the quality of speakers is really, really high, and the

quality of me as a speaker is not so high because of my inexperience. So as we go along,

I really ask that you bear with me, bear with my nose, bear with my clunkiness, but I just

hope that someone, somehow, may be helped in some way as a result of something that I say.

My sobriety date is the 1st of June, 2020, and so technically I'm entering into my third year

of sobriety because today in New Zealand, where I'm dialing in from, it is already New Year's

Day, so happy New Year's to everyone here. It's actually 10 past 9 on the 1st of January 2022,

and there's a guy in the 24-hour international marathon meeting that says,

he says, I've been sober all day and I just love it. I have the privilege and the ability to say,

I've been sober all day or week or year and ever since 2020 as a result of this program in action.

So AA New Zealand got started in 1945 by a guy, a guy by the name of Ian McKee as an MCE

of reviewing his last name. He checked himself into a psychiatric hospital after trying every

known method of recovery at that time, and he picked up a copy of the reader's digest

and then the reader's digest. There was an article written by a fellow member of our

boss anonymous, and there was a footnote in the article saying, you know, any interested persons

or parties who wish to correspond with AA can do so by writing to, you know, PO Box 459

New York, and there was a bit of correspondence between him and Bill Wilson.

...