Meet Max

My name is Max...

and I am an alcoholic.

This is not a chair, a share or a life story- but rather a reassurance that if you are reading this and are an alcoholic like myself, you are not alone.

My inspiration in doing this website was simple: I recently moved abroad from my home country of England, where I had a settled routine of three meetings per week, to the Philippines (owing to job relocation)- and I was completely stumped for AA meetings.

Both my wife and I searched high and low on the web, in and out of every search engine, and neither of us could come up with a meeting list. The resources for meetings in the U.S & Canada were abundant- and pretty good for Europe also, but as for the "rest of the world" (except Australia), amazingly it was dead end after dead end. Both of us were able to find website listings, meeting addresses and telephone numbers in the Manila area, but the websites were either non-existent or completely out of date, the telephone numbers out of service and the meeting venues having no awareness of an AA meeting ever having taken place.

As I joined some online forums, I shared my frustration at not being able to find suitable meetings with my peers and, to my horror, a lot of other members from all over the world said the same that they had gone through the same labyrinthine experience. In my opinion, this is extremely serious. We need our meetings, it is our medicine. If we had cancer, would it be excusable to be denied our medication because of a lack of information resources? I do want to say that I do not blame AA for this - I am always astounded how much is achieved on a worldwide scale considering that the organization is completely non-profit.

I know that a lot of the sites are manned by members doing service- who move on or, dare I even think it, relapse- and the information is just not maintained. I hope that by doing this website I am able in some small way to help my fellow AA members find the right AA meeting at the right time in the right place, anywhere in the world, like I was looking for in the Philippines. You will notice that I have included in AAmeetingslist.org an extensive worldwide telephone directory for AA meetings - as this is still the best method, in my opinion, of making contact with the local AA group in the place that you are visiting.

Although the internet has come on leaps and bounds in the last couple of years (and I highly recommend the online meetings)- one is still faced with the dilemma of not knowing 100% if the information is correct and updated- this especially as AA is non-profit and many of the locations are changed by outside forces e.g: finance. Consequently, one ends up having to telephone up anyway to confirm the details. However, I have listed the main AA accredited websites and the larger ones that I have personally checked out, such as "thecountryname" AA.org website. I will be adding to this website directory slowly, but I do not want at this stage to put out any "maybe" websites- causing you, my peers, even more frustration.

I do want to apologize to my international peers that this is an English-only website at the moment, with details in the main on English-speaking meetings. I hope to remedy this in the near term.

Thank you and Keep Coming Back!!!