We had our district roundup this weekend - it is an AA/alanon weekend, held at a local campground. It's always quite a lot of fun - pot luck dinner on Saturday night, pancake breakfast on Sunday, lot of open meetings, and speakers.

It's never very well organized here - nobody ever knows who's doing what, and what time. I have some experience of this, so came prepared to chair the alanon meeting, just in case. I brought a book with the steps and traditions in it, and did an little searching for a good reading that explained our program (I picked the reading on the first step, from "12 steps and 12 traditions").

When the time came for the alanon meeting, there were only three actual alanon members at the site. So, I went around to the various trailors and motorhomes, and told everyubody "Open alanon meeting in five minutes, AA's welcome".

Eventually we had about a dozen people, mostly they had never been to an alanon meeting before. Usually here the chairperson waits and shares last , but I figured in this case, where most of the people don't really know our program, I would share first on my own journey, just to get them into it. Then we went around the circle.

It worked out in a way I would not have imagined. Almost every alcoholic there found that they also qualified as an alanon - most came from alcoholic homes. It was an incredibly moving meeting - some of them had never shared on this aspect of their lives.

I had been feeling kinda bad - there were so few alanons there, and I thought it would be a pretty lousy meeting. Instead it turned out to be one of the best I've had - go figure.

-- Edited by lin0606 at 20:31, 2006-08-21