Heart to Heart

During the summer of 1995, I was transferred from Washington, D.C. (where AA meetings are abundant) to the Moslem country of Bahrain, a small island fifteen miles off the eastern coast of Saudi Arabia. As a U.S. Navy sailor with ten months of sobriety, my main concern was how I'd maintain my AA program. After all, the stereotypical thinking goes, the Moslems don't drink, so I wondered if AA would be nonexistent except for meetings on the base. I was newly sober, recovering from a three-year relapse after sixteen years of continuous sobriety. But I knew that in any random group of people, one in ten has a drinking problem, and I strongly suspected that Bahrainis were no different. Perhaps more of them hid their problem, since the stigma of alcoholism in Moslem countries was a lot worse--still, there must be an AA meeting somewhere in Bahrain. And I thought nothing was going to stand in the way of my sobriety. I had to learn that I could stand in the way of my sobriety.