I was not able to identify any active Perl groups in Africa. Perl Mongers listed a Cape Town group, but it's home page was for Fruit com. And an e-mail to the the group leader bounced back to me.

So I decided to seek help from other Perl Monger groups. I posted my quest to 4 Perl Mongers' mailing lists, one of them being London.pm. I also did some searches (through a couple of my favorite search engines) that were unsuccessful except that they turned up Ananzi, a search engine that aims to be the best in South Africa. Through Ananzi I identified a likely Perl user in Africa, who I then emailed about my quest. But I got no response.

In time, a Perl user from Johannesburg, South Africa who was in the UK on business responded to my post on the London.pm mailing list.

An interesting side effect of the London.pm post was that Belden Lyman, who lives right here in Oakland, learned of Oakland.pm and became active in the group.

For a long time whenever I tried to access the Costa Rica Perl Mongers' site, I would get a lengthy error message about an Internal Server Error. I sent e-mail to the Costa Rica Perl Mongers group leader asking for help in accessing that site, and a very short time later I was able to access the site. I got a very interesting e-mail which among other things expressed dissatisfaction at having Costa Rica classified as part of South America.

This led to an interesting e-mail correspondence on that and many other subjects. During this correspondence, an intriguing map of the Americas appeared on the Costa Rica home page. Check it out.

I particularly enjoyed my visit to the Rotterdam.pm site. I visited the sites of the 6 members who listed their sites. One image I especially liked was of a squirrel drinking a Bud through a straw on the site of Hartog "Sinister" de Mik. Since I was drawn to the group, I subscribed to the mailing list. I also sent email to the group leader and one of the members. However, for a long time, I received no emails and no posts.

So I sent e-mails to Leuven.pm and Vienna.pm whose sites I wanted to visit but was unable to access. Both responded. Neither has a site at this time. The Leuven.pm may have a site in the near future.

After I'd heard from Leuven.pm and Vienna.pm and completed my quest by connecting with a Perl user in Africa, I did get an e-mail from the group leader of the Rotterdam.pm and also began receiving posts from the mailing list. It turns out the mailing list had been broken for a while.

Perl Mongers listed just one non-geographical group, Nomads.pm. I contacted the group leader of Nomads.pm and he thanked me for my interest and answered my questions about his group's name and how it came to be non-geographical.

One of his inspirations for the group was the MarsNeedsWomen.pm group, which is no longer on Perl Mongers' non-geographical list. There's not much to the site, but the image you'll see if you go there is compelling.

I sent e-mail to two nearby groups but neither responded. So I tried two more groups that were farther away, but neither responded. But I did enjoy an image of a camel walking across the campus on the AnnArbor.pm home page.

Then I emailed the group leader of the Monterey.pm and was amazed to get a reply in less than 5 minutes.

Later after I completed my quest, I got in touch with the San Francico group. In turns out I had been using an obsolete email address taken from a page on their site that interested me. I also then connected with the Sonoma.pm. Both SanFrancisco.pm and Sonoma.pm have been very helpful in getting us started.

I sent e-mail to the group leader of the Hawkes Bay Group, but it bounced because his disk quota was exceeded. Eventually I got a message back indicating that the site was in the planning stage, that he was open to suggestions, and providing a more accessible e-mail address.

I made some modest suggestions, and he replied that he would implement them. Some time later, he implemented many of them and added an intriguing background of hammerhead sharks.

I sent email to the leader of the Caracas group which didn't appear to have a site, asking about that. It turns out the group exists, but it's small and noone wants to bother with having a site.