NAWS Worldwide Workshop For Middle East NA Communities, Bahrain , February 2005 During the three days of this workshop the above slogan-which is quite popular in the NA Gulf-became the recurring cheer among the attendees and NAWS travelers alike. Shouted at the top of your lungs, it serves as a call to NA service. a call to carry the message to the suffering addict: Help somebody!!! NA World Services welcomed more than fifty funded and unfunded participants from the Middle Eastern NA communities of Lebanon , Egypt , Saudi Arabia , Iran . Kuwait . Bahrain , and Oman to this workshop. We send a special thanks to the Bahraini members for their outstanding work organizing the event. Prior to the workshop, participating communities filled out questionnaires, and the responses helped us plan the workshop structure and agenda. Posters of our NA principles and vision, maps. and displays were put up in Arabic. Farsi . and English. Also, NAWS arranged for a consolidated literature order shipment to the workshop location, and the attending communities were able to take literature and the posters back to their groups. After welcoming everyone and introductions, we encouraged the participants to share their hopes and expectations for this workshop personal hopes as well as outcomes for NA service delivery in the Middle Eastern NA communities. Our initial session focused on the service structure overall. Many of the problems that members identified are common in NA communities all over the world. This is truly "the ties that bind us" as were the solutions gathered from the group. "Helping the suffering addict" was a major focus of our second workshop- "Atmosphere of Recovery." Cooperation among the Middle East communities was the theme of our third session. The key areas discussed were: translations, an adaptation of the NA Just for Today video for use in the Middle East , and the idea of a Middle East Zonal Forum. We received overwhelmingly positive feedback in emails about the event. We hope this 2005 workshop will contribute to building a stronger foundation for NA in the Middle East , supporting healthy growth for our fellowship in each community, and encouraging continued solid recovery ... with love for NA service and in the spirit of "Help Somebody!!"
NAWS News November 2005 If you have additional information on NA Iran / NA in the Persian language, please e-mail us at address below. |
