The 1999 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership

BIOGRAPHY of Angela Gomes

Angela Gomes, born to a poor Christian family in East Pakistan in 1952, somehow escaped the sort of life she would have been expected to have. As part of a very small religious minority in a predominantly Muslim and secondarily Hindu land, she should have grown up with perhaps only a bit more freedom than her Muslim sisters. She should have grown up deprived even of food in times of poverty, in a culture in which women worked hard at the dirtiest, most menial jobs, and still ate last, if there was anything left, often receiving what was not fit "even for dogs." She should probably have been married off by the age of fifteen, to a man who may well have beaten her and subjected her to psychological torture. If her dowry were thought to be insufficient, her husband might have abandoned her and taken another wife, and she would have had no recourse but to appeal to an all-male village council that would undoubtedly have supported the man's right to treat his "property" however he pleased. If she were not abandoned, she would have borne any number of children and had full responsibility for their care. She would probably have died of deprivation and exhaustion before she was fifty-five.

But Angela Gomes did escape. And she devoted her life to helping other Bengali (later Bangladeshi) women, mostly her Muslim sisters, escape as well. She had some advantages to start with, a few "saving graces." Perhaps the first of these was a good, stable family in which there was no deprivation of women, no beating, no torture. Gomes says her father loved his children very much and helped them to study in the evenings. He was sickly and hardworking, but so honest that he was always summoned to court as a witness in all kinds of disputes and cases-and his word was trusted and respected.

Gomes described her mother as a "goddess," a woman who worked hard in the house and in the garden all day long and, yet, like her father, was also summoned to service in the village. She visited the sick, remembers Gomes, even one man whose body was rotting from scabies, making him smell so badly that even his nearest relatives neglected him. And she washed the dead. She went to church every morning and prayed that her children would grow up to be honest and good.

Gomes's second advantage is that she was born into a Christian family, in a predominantly Christian village not far from the capital Dhaka. There were Christian schools there and missionaries who believed strongly in education for girls. Her first schooling was at Mathbari Mission Elementary School, which was only a kilometer from her house. After she had completed the five years offered in that school, she did a sixth year at Panjora Mission School, fifteen kilometers away, with an elder brother helping to pay the boarding expenses by working in the mission in the evenings. She finished the year at the top of her class, at the age of twelve. Since she could go no further in her education without going further from home, her parents decided to keep her at home and find her a husband within two or three years.

At this point, Gomes's own gumption came into play as perhaps the major factor in her personal rescue from what might have been and in her phenomenal success in saving other women from similar fates. She was proactive and brave enough to go after what she needed for herself: education and the freedom to choose a path different from that of marriage. And when she saw and understood the way her Muslim sisters lived in the villages, she felt such compassion that she vowed to find ways to alleviate their situation. She did whatever it took and, in the end, touched the lives of some half a million Bangladeshi women.

Gomes befriended an American priest named Father Bergman, and he gave her a job teaching class one in the mission school and helped her arrange a year of distance training in teaching methods from Holy Cross College in Dhaka. Then, when she pleaded with him that she be allowed to study full-time, he suggested that she write some other missions with her request, which she did, thus securing herself a position in Kushtia district's Bhabarpara Mission School. This school, however, was more than three hundred kilometers from her home, and neither her brother nor her sympathetic brother-in-law even knew where it was. But, impressed by her determination, they helped her go there. At Bhabarpara, she studied for two years and was the favorite of the Italian Mother Superior, Perina. Gomes says she impressed Mother Perina by always being willing to take on any task, however menial or dirty, and by always being able to summon up the necessary physical strength, even though she was of slight frame, to do it. Mother Perina seemed to hope she would become a nun.

When Mother Perina was transferred to Sacred Heart School in Jessore, Gomes moved too, and there she earned her keep by teaching nursery school as she studied, in addition to doing various chores for the nuns. But her own studying was irregular, and she was able to finish her bachelor of arts degree mostly by self-study and then by passing the examination of a local Muslim school, the Sebasanga School.

The Catholic mission school system was, however, like an island in a lake of competing religions and ideologies. Christians made up less than 1 percent of the population in the area where the mission schools operated. Moreover, the Catholic school system was basically a foreign institution, although teaching was conducted in the native language of Bengali. It is, then, not too surprising that the school was set up in an insular fashion, with most students boarding within, and students, teachers, and even the sisters were restricted from spending much time outside the mission. Furthermore, Gomes came of age during a highly volatile political era, which saw Pakistan separated into East and West-an unwieldy British creation to separate Muslims from Hindus when they liberated colonial India after World War II-and the creation of the new state of Bangladesh. This led to war in the new state, as West Pakistan refused to ease its grip on its poorer eastern half. India, however, supported the Bengalis and joined the fray. Since Jessore was very near the Indian border, it may have seemed wise to be more vigilant about keeping students and teachers within the confines of the mission.

But no one could confine Angela Gomes. Since the sisters trusted her, she was sent on external errands, and she found ways to experience the more common life outside the mission. She saw frightening sights during the war: bodies strewn in the streets and subsequently collected into cow- or ox-drawn carts. There were, she says, separate cemeteries for the major religions-Muslim, Hindu, and Christian-but there were so many dead bodies that they were just thrown into open graves at any convenient place. The stench of death was so heavy in the town that it made everyone sick.

And there were worse times. When the Pakistani soldiers came, they rounded up women and young girls and raped them again and again. Official estimates in a report quoted by the Global Policy Forum list approximately two hundred rapes. The aftermath of this was a large number of babies born in disgrace, many of whom were eventually adopted by foreigners. Many of the mothers committed suicide. (Writers on rape as a strategy of war agree that rape is carried out largely to weaken the integrity of the opposing ethnic group, by forcing, in this case, Bengali women to bear Punjabi babies.)

To save the Catholic school girls from rape, one of the priests from a town near the border with India brought them to the jungle and, thus, closer to the border to seek safety. They were, however, caught by the Pakistani troops and many were killed, including the priest. One Italian priest was also killed, and when the Italian ambassador voiced strong protests, the soldiers apologized and offered to do whatever they could by way of restitution. Local churchmen reached an agreement with the military that from then on anyone wearing a cross would not be touched. It is not known whether this agreement was honored, but Gomes was given a cross to wear.

But she knew the war was a temporary feature of life. She was even more disturbed by what her village outings taught her about the daily living conditions of the women in the area. Bangladesh was an extremely poor country and predominantly Muslim, although the culture had also absorbed some of the more oppressive features of the neighboring Hindus. Poor women were married off at an early age, sometimes at twelve or thirteen, and then they became the property of their husbands, defenseless against any kind of mistreatment. They were restricted from schools and markets, kept within the house where they worked to the bone, and subject to all kinds of abuses from their husbands and mothers-in-law. They had no legal rights and could appeal nowhere for justice when they were mistreated. They could be divorced or abandoned at the husbands' whim. They were even forbidden to utter the names of their husbands. "It is easier to undermine a woman," says Gomes, "than to drink a glass of water."

Before she finished her schooling, Gomes knew she had to reach out to these women, investigate why their lives were like this, and see if she could do something to alleviate their suffering. Many times, she and one of the sisters, an Indian nun, went out to talk with the women, but Gomes felt indignant that the sister did nothing except console the suffering women, offering medicine and ointment and telling them they must bear with it, for what could they do. Gomes wanted to know why the nun did not try to organize them, get them to fight back. In thinking about her own mother and the natural hardships of poverty she faced, Gomes felt sure her mother would not have been able to carry on if she was being beaten; she would surely have left. She wondered why these women stayed on, living on the burnt food in the bottom of the pans in which they had cooked meals for their families. She wondered what these women would need to be able to liberate themselves.

Gomes was barely fifteen years old when she first started thinking about this. The nun simply said that better times for the women might come some day but, in the meantime, Gomes should behave herself and stop talking like a revolutionary, so that the sisters would continue to like and trust her.

And so she did. But she did not stop observing, and thinking. Even after she graduated, she continued to meet resistance. The nuns told her to go home and stay safe; the priest who lived and worked with the poor also said she must leave, as he did not want to create a scandal by letting her live in the mission. Moreover, her father wanted her to come home and get married before she got any older; she was twenty-one and, in a year or so, it would be impossible to find a husband for her.

One of the small children she taught at the Sacred Heart School in Jessore was a Muslim boy named Bapi. Gomes describes him as being "abnormal," but it seems more likely that he was hyperactive. Gomes was the only one who could deal with him successfully, so when his family moved to Dhaka, they really missed her. Finally, the mother wrote and pleaded with Gomes to come and stay with them in Dhaka, promising an easy and secure life and even a husband, if that was what she wanted. Any kind of husband, she said, Muslim, Christian, professional, whatever. Gomes tried this living arrangement for some months (without a husband, of course) but found it too easy. She kept pleading with Father Chachi to find her a place to stay in Jessore, so she could work with the village women. At last, the priest told her she could stay with a poor gardener and his family just outside the mission. But he warned her that they did not live like the people in the mission but like the village poor. To obtain her family's blessings, she used her living situation in Dhaka to convince her father to let her return to Jessore, telling him that she had been living with a Muslim family and might end up marrying a Muslim. The alternative, she quickly asserted, was for her to go back to Jessore and work for the priest. All this, she admits, was merely stretching the truth a little bit-the priest had simply found her a place to live, not a job-but she felt she needed her father's consent.

So, she returned to Jessore and lived with the gardener's family. To support herself, she did some translation work for Father Chachi and some teaching at the Social Training Center run by Fr. Orlando Wiley. Here she found that the women slum dwellers near the city lived in even worse conditions than the village women did. The urban poor women worked in other people's houses as maids and tried to feed their whole families with the leftover food from the people they worked for. And since that was never enough, they themselves would end up eating the spoiled scraps. Still, their husbands would abuse and beat them when they returned home. To make matters worse, when these slum dwellers became desperate for money, they often sold their village land; sometimes they were asked to sign blank pieces of paper by unscrupulous persons and were tricked out of all that they owned.

Gomes assumed that most people would be better off if they stayed in their villages, where at least they had fresh air and perhaps a chance to cultivate some vegetables or raise some animals. She therefore decided to work in the rural areas so that any project she began there would provide a reason for people to stay in their village rather than be drawn to life in the city slums. Thus, Gomes committed to work for a year in the village, and then it became another year and another. And then it became a lifetime.

Gomes knew she could teach; she had been doing that for years. But she suddenly found herself at a loss because she did not know how to teach what the poor needed to learn: how to make money. She slowly ventured into a number of things, doing whatever she found suitable resources for. She had a group of very poor women with no access to land raising mulberry bushes for silkworms along the sides of public roads. If there were a poor widow who had land but was too old or weak to use it, Gomes would bring in a group of women to raise vegetables on it.

At one point, an Italian priest and nun from another mission, Satkhira Mission, passed by the Social Training Center on their way to Dhaka with some jute handicraft products they were marketing for a people's organization. Although Gomes herself never learned much about handicrafts (she used to hide under her desk when the nuns would ask for volunteers to sew, because she much preferred to be out in the garden), she was impressed by this work and by how much money she was told it was bringing in. So she asked the visiting sister and the father to give her permission to stay in their mission for one month to learn to do that sort of handicraft. When they said no, she appealed to Father Chachi to persuade his fellow Italians to give her this chance. Father Chachi had already learned that when Gomes's mind was set, he could not change it, so he did as she requested and she spent a month learning jute work in the Satkhira Mission.

After one month of enduring blisters and bloody fingers from handicraft work, Gomes was finally pleased with the quality of her jute work. She was ready to go back and teach her new skills. For this, she chose a sweepers' colony in a slum neighborhood of the village Khorki and set the women to work. But when the representatives of Caritas, the Catholic organization that marketed the jute, came to pick up the goods, they were judged to be below acceptable quality standards. This was a real setback in what had seemed an easy way to bring help to women, for it meant Gomes had to spend days and weeks of walking from location to location to work directly with the women involved, teaching them one by one and going over their work again and again. Her days ended with blistered fingers and tired feet, but she did what had to be done. Finally, she returned to Father Chachi and asked if he might provide her with money for a rickshaw so that she could get around more easily. That he refused, but he said they had a bicycle she could use, which she gladly accepted.

Much earlier, when she was still a boarder at Holy Cross College, she had asked one of the sisters if she could learn to ride the sister's motorbike. The sister had assured her that Bengali girls did not ride bikes and that it would be bad for her. Gomes did not bring the subject up again, but she paid close attention to how the sister started the bike, how she drove it, and even where she kept the key when it was not in use. Then, during one school break when that sister, and most of the boarders, were not around, Gomes taught herself to ride the motorbike. Of course, she did eventually get caught and was punished by being deprived of food. But when her friend Mother. Perina returned and saw how pale and faint Gomes looked because of lack of nourishment, she immediately fed her. And when she heard the tale of the motorbike, she exclaimed that Gomes could become Mother General someday! Now her disobedience-and gumption-found its natural reward.

Later, she had another month's training in making different kinds of jute products, again in the interest of putting herself in a better position to coach the women of the villages into doing work that was truly of export quality. But she continued to have trouble with quality control, to the extent that the whole project seemed to backfire on her. She was seen as a troublemaker by the more established community, because she drew village women away from the pool of potential domestic helpers, and even from their wifely duties at home, and now she was not able to pay them anywhere near their expectations. She put in money of her own, but this was not enough, and besides, she really did need to make the point that quality was important.

Soon there were rumors in the village, saying that she was living with the priest, that she was the prostitute of the priest, etc. One Sunday morning she got up very early to find that there were posters up all around the mission, denouncing her. Father Wiley noticed her distress and decided on some confrontational tactics: he called all the women and went over all the books with them. He showed them that in truth Gomes had been paying out more money than she was taking in and, therefore, they owed her money! Nevertheless, when she continued to go around the villages, she was attacked and pelted with stones and even human excrement.

This was obviously a low period in Gomes's life, but still she was more concerned about the women she had set out to help, thinking that she herself could always leave, go home, and maybe get married, or work somewhere else, while the village women were trapped, without options. And if she could be treated so badly when she was self-sufficient and strong-willed, what would be the fate of the much weaker, meek, silent women of the villages?

Father Chachi came to her aid again, suggesting that she come to teach in his village school, in a sort of a training program in which village women could learn to read and write and become self-reliant. But the courses ran for only two months in any one set of villages, and Gomes tried this but found that the time was just not sufficient. She ran into resistance because she was a Christian woman in a Muslim area, and because she was unmarried and had no children. Some even thought it was bad luck to see her face. She was also impatient with the program because it seemed to her that it started on the wrong level: women needed to learn livelihood skills before they needed to learn to read. She begged Father Chachi to make it a six-month program, but he said he did not have the money for it.

By that time, she had gotten to know some Muslim women whom she considered good friends, and who trusted her. So she simply left the mission and moved out on her own, this time acting as a Muslim woman. She felt fortunate that her name, in both its Islamic and Hindu forms, was auspicious: she became Anjo, short for the Muslim name Anjomara, and the Hindu Anjoli, both meaning "an offering to God." She prayed with the Muslims-one imam even told his followers that she was the best of the Muslim women-but her private prayers were still Christian. She told everyone she was married and had two children, but her husband was out of the country for education and her children were with her parents.

She says she did not actually tell the people she was a Muslim, but she covered herself with a veil in public and behaved as a modest Muslim woman. And she did begin reading the Koran, along with the Hindu Bhagavad Gita, both in the Bengali language. She found that both these religious texts, along with her own Christian Bible, preached kindness and fair treatment toward women. She began pointing this out to the religious leaders, saying the God of Islam would be happy with them if they tried to help women as they helped the poor.

In this way, she charmed the imams and worked in the villages for five years. With the backing of the religious leaders, it was, of course, much easier to organize the women. She also persuaded one of the men in the village to allow the women to use some uncultivated marshy land that he owned. She then put the women to work on this land to turn it into a fishpond in which they could raise tilapia. But when she returned to the Social Training Center to borrow spades from Father Wiley for this purpose, she again heard rumors criticizing her relationship with the priest. Consequently, Father Wiley asked her not to return to the mission any more. But he went to visit the fishpond and delivered some new spades for the project.

With the aid of Mr. Siddique, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) representative in Jessore, she used UNICEF technology to get water from tube wells to fill the pond. Then, she began considering how to get the fish fingerlings. She and her women friends, Aminah Pah, Saleha, and Rokeya, went to the government fisheries station to watch and learn: How are the fish fed and maintained? How are they handled at various stages of development? (Of course, she says, she never learned about such practical matters in college.) She asked so many questions and demonstrated such great interest that finally the fisheries officer said he would give her some tilapia fingerlings free of cost. She answered "Well, you have to give them to me for free because I don't have any money anyway." Then, Caritas gave her prawns and also asked nothing in return, because they could see her intense motivation.

With some success at fish raising, Gomes began to look for other projects, but each one involved new struggles and necessitated new learning experiences. When she and the village women started raising chickens, the chickens all died. But Gomes noted that there were some villagers, in general, the more well-to-do people, whose chickens did not die, so she set out to find out why not. She went to the government's livestock office and found out about poultry vaccinations, but when she asked the officer there to teach her what she needed to know, she was told that she would have to go to a special school, Mymensingh University, in another district, and stay for about a month to learn how to care for the chickens. Then, she found that UNICEF had set up a grant to send people to this program, so she wrote applications for two village women, both widows with children, to go to learn to care for the poultry. And from then on, those two women handled the vaccinations and kept the village chickens alive. One of them, in fact, showed special talent for caring for chickens. When a group of chickens ate some poisoned feed, she quickly figured out that the food would stay in the "food bag" on the chicken's neck for some time before it would go into the stomach and cause death. So, she slit open the food bags of the affected chickens, washed them down, and sewed them back up, putting some healing herbs on the incisions. These emergency efforts saved the chickens and, of course, established her reputation as a "chicken doctor."

With the poultry project going well, Gomes went back to visit the sisters at Holy Cross College and asked what work they could suggest that would have the fastest turnaround time for profit. Sister Mike asked Gomes what the women already knew how to do, and Gomes told her about the traditional embroidery done by the women of Jessore, the nakshi kantha stitch. The embroidered bedspreads, cushion covers, etc., were prepared for marriages and were made by poor women, but the pay was minimal and the products had never been commercialized. The traditional designs had never even been set down on paper, but the women could stitch them. Sister Mike sent Gomes back for samples, and when she received them, she was delighted. The sister asked Gomes to send her the women who already knew how to do this work. So, Gomes sent eighteen women from Jessore to Dhaka, and the sister rented a big house for them to stay in and put them to work, offering a few new designs and color schemes and teaching them something about quality control. They earned well from this work, and a month later came back to spread their new ideas to other village women. This became another village project, with the women gathering under a large tree to work together, even though village troublemakers harassed them. Eventually, though, the village women booked the whole roof of a bus to send their finished products to Dhaka where Sister Mike marketed them internationally, and they earned very well.

And so Gomes's work in the Muslim villages continued. It is important to note, however, that she was doing more than setting up livelihood projects for women to increase their personal and family incomes. She was set to make even more fundamental differences in their lives simply by making them part of an organization, a group that shared various personal and political concerns. She started just by listening to the women as they sat together discussing livelihood projects. They told her stories of their hard lives, how they went hungry, how their husbands criticized them and beat them. Sometimes, she says, some of the husbands would join the conversation, and she found that they were also suffering, "tortured" people. But no matter how bad poverty was for everyone in the village, it was always compounded for women, because socially, culturally, economically, and politically, they were powerless.

But women who were earning, and who were learning to give voice to their oppression, became empowered. Now they could not be exploited by the rich and forced to work for starvation wages, because they knew they could work in the village group for a fair return. Their husbands could not starve them, because they made the money themselves, and the men could not beat them because they were more ready to resist, strengthened by their newfound self-respect as income earners and group members.

Gomes's projects created their own backlash, however. Some men in the villages destroyed the mulberry bushes on which the women were raising silk worms. Some handicrafts were burned. And rumors were starting to the effect that Gomes was part of an underground political party, a communist, and thus a danger to the village. The District Commissioner was, in fact, already aware of these rumors when Gomes went to see him to discuss the problems the women were having. He was sympathetic and sent her to officials at the Social Training Department of the government-the precursor of Social Services-and they, in turn, sent her to the Social Welfare Office. The officials there instantly came up with a partial solution: she must register her organization. Her groups-at that time, forty village organizations-must be brought together into a formal organization, with a legal persona. And this was the birth of the Banchte Shekha (Learning to Survive) Movement.

At this time, since she had to comply with legal formalities, Gomes had to tell the villagers who she really was, that she was actually a Christian and unmarried. She was initially met with disbelief. "You eat beef," accused a close friend. "How can you be a Christian?" "Christians eat everything," answered Gomes. Then she said that if they all thought she was a bad woman, she would not go there any more. Maybe, she said, she could send money once in a while, but they would not see her again, since she was Christian and therefore "evil." She was, of course, forgiven at that point, forgiven for lying and then truly accepted into the community for herself, as she was.

The birth of Banchte Shekha necessitated more formal organization than Gomes had instituted earlier. She had to have a general body, elected from among the village members, and an executive committee or managing committee, and that committee needed a chair. Gomes was pragmatic on this point; she knew that the group would be disadvantaged if the chair were a woman and a Christian. She had a Muslim friend, a woman doctor named Pia, who was actually a member of the Communist Party, but who was very open to Gomes's work and saw the good in it. Gomes asked Pia to invite her father, Professor Sharif Hossain, to chair the executive committee. A well-respected Muslim scholar and principal of a college, Hossain at first demurred because Gomes was a Christian and, it seemed to him, her Bengali sounded rather foreign. (This may have been because she spent so much time in school with foreign missionaries, who no doubt spoke in accented Bengali.) But he kept an open mind; he spoke with her at great length, checked up on her work, investigated her, and even sent her to speak with Muslim religious leaders. Thus satisfied that she was doing good work, he became the first chair of Banchte Shekha in 1981.

Gomes's early contacts with international funding organizations all came naturally, mostly through her church contacts. Sister Mike, who had nurtured the embroidery project, introduced her to a Canadian woman who had asked to visit the project. Gomes agreed to this only after the village women involved in the project consented to the visit. The Canadian was from Canadian University Services Overseas (CUSO), and she became interested in funding Gomes's village groups. But this proposal was initially met with suspicion among the women, because, in their experience, nothing ever came for free. They believed that if someone gave money to help you out of some kind of crisis, you were more than likely to find out later that that person now owned your land. The whole concept of a foundation that funded worthwhile nonprofit programs was new to them, as it was to Gomes.

So, at this point in her life, Gomes learned to write proposals. And these generally had to be written in English, a language she had never studied. But she learned, and at one point commented that when she spoke English to some of the highly educated Westerners she was then meeting, she realized she could consider herself more educated than they, because she could manage to use their language, while they knew none of hers.

Another early contact was a man named Paul Robinson who was a PhD candidate with a grant from the Ford Foundation to investigate organizations that assisted women. He stayed with Banchte Shekha for a whole month and, later, was a helpful advocate for Ford Foundation funding. Then, the Asia Foundation and the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD) also became interested. Most funding organizations sent representatives to meet Gomes and see her projects firsthand, and such visitors continued to provide both learning experiences and to be a treat for the women involved and for Gomes herself.

One visitor narrates that his group was welcomed to Banchte Shekha by forty or so members, who met them eagerly and put on a play that depicted the abuse of a young woman by both her husband and mother-in-law. She was, however, a member of Banchte Shekha and, soon, the paralegals appeared and forced a confrontation. They acquainted the abusive relatives with the legal provisions and threatened to bring a lawsuit against them. Then, the relatives had a sudden change of heart; they decided they actually loved the young wife and promised to treat her well. At the end, visitors and participants both sang "We Shall Overcome."

In its mature form, Banchte Shekha is grounded in village groups of thirty or thirty-five poor oppressed women. They are engaged in a variety of livelihood programs such as fishery projects, poultry raising, cow raising, and embroidery and other handicrafts. They are also part of a savings and loan project in which they put a minimum amount of money each week and decide themselves under what circumstances members are allowed to borrow from the fund. Loans are interest-free and have no real deadline for repayment, which in any case would be scheduled on a gradual basis. But repayment rate is approximately 99 percent, much better than any commercial bank can even dream about. If someone does resist paying, the other women, who presumably know each person's resources, help her figure out how to pay. If she really cannot pay, the loan will be delayed or forgiven.

Each village group elects seven representatives to the overall organization. The elected representatives usually change from year to year so that many women have the opportunity to do this, but Gomes says the village women usually elect whoever has been the most active in the organization and its programs and struggles.

The staff of the overall Banchte Shekha is headed by Gomes, and there are four directors under her, each in charge of several programs. The livelihood programs have already been considered at length, but there is also a health program, an education program, a training institute, and a democracy program. The directors run these programs, often going to the villages for direct monitoring and follow-up. There is also an administrative staff for day-to-day managing and record keeping. Some of the special programs have their own personnel. For instance, there are paramedical workers in the health program and about one hundred teachers and nine education organizers in the education program. The education programs are nontraditional and involve mostly literacy training and promoting social awareness. Much of this is done through songs, often composed by Gomes herself, and drama, put together by groups.

The health programs involve mostly primary health care, with the paramedical workers holding meetings with village groups and going house to house to check latrines and talk with pregnant women and other mothers about prenatal care, child nutrition, de-worming, etc. Banchte Shekha's health workers are also trained to administer immunizations and do so under a Ford Foundation-funded immunization program.

There are suborganizers and submanagers in every union or group of villages. The manager and the organizer usually live together in their area of responsibility and travel around it by bike. They oversee what is going on in all the programs.

Many of Banchte Shekha's staff members are women from the area who were earlier involved as simple members or were relatives of members. First priority is always given to these "homegrown" women in assigning both paid and volunteer jobs.

Each of these aspects of Banchte Shekha contributes to the betterment of the lives of the poor women in the villages of Bangladesh and, therefore, helps to empower those women. The livelihood programs and the savings and loan program put money into their hands and, thus, give them economic power. Literacy brings its own rewards and, of course, helps them take control over other aspects of their lives. The health programs save children and, again, teach the mothers how to control yet another facet of their lives.

But there is one more element of women's lives in this context that needs special attention and it is the element that drew Angela Gomes into her life's work in the first place. That is the issue of domestic violence, i.e., the way in which Bangladeshi men beat, tortured, and starved their wives with impunity. These negative values and attitudes seemed to be firmly embedded in the culture in ways that could hardly be questioned: wives were little more than property and each man could treat his property as he wished. Furthermore, any woman who could not tolerate such treatment, who wanted to seek justice within her community, could only go to the village elders, who were male and shared the predominant attitude. The woman would, therefore, only create more problems for herself.

Gomes had been concerned with this problem from the start, but it took some time before she was in a position to deal with it. She had to spend many years talking with women and helping them deal with some of the other problems in their lives. She had to get to know what village life was like and how the men thought and felt about their own lives. She had to become part of the community.

When Banchte Shekha was well established and the time was ripe, Gomes met this problem head on. She called an assembly of people from several villages and presented the problem, initially by showing a video of the torture of women. She and her group were initially shouted down by an argumentative and hostile male audience. But then Gomes took the microphone and began talking. She excused herself first and said she was sorry for wasting their time, but grateful to have a chance to be heard. Then she started telling her life story, how concerned she had been over this problem, and how she had left her village and her community to live among Muslims and Hindus who were initially hostile to her. She told of the work she had been doing and the problems and trials she had experienced. Then, she stressed how pleasant their lives could be if they treated their wives with more respect, so that there would be love within their families.

And then they began listening. Finally, a man took the microphone and told the group that the Koran says that women should be treated with justice and kindness. Another said that the same lesson could be found in the Gita.

And thus "we washed their brains," says Gomes nonchalantly. They observed which men were convinced and which men could be counted on to help them, and they had more meetings and more discussions. Fortunately, the laws of the land, as well as the religious texts, backed up the ideas of justice and fair treatment for women. Thus, Gomes was able to find some of the more enlightened village leaders who were ready to take a step forward on this issue.

Then, Banchte Shekha was able to set up a new program and a new paralegal apparatus, called the Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) Program. This is a system of village-based committees, local men and women (seven women, four men), handpicked to include influential male members of the community. These committees meet on demand to help resolve domestic problems, mostly wife beating and other cases of domestic injustice. Banchte Shekha's own paralegal staff, made up primarily of village women volunteers, help train committee members and watch over the communities for cases that should be brought before the committee. They also help monitor whether the final agreement of a particular case is carried out.

Gomes stresses that the committees are not empowered to mete out legal punishment. They base their authority on their power to convince both parties that they must do the right thing. She courted the male power structure, both religious and political leaders, to get the necessary backing to make the system work. Of course, some of the leaders were harder to convince than others, but once the ADR program caught on, it began to gain political capital and elected officials felt they had to support it. Women were beginning to vote more frequently too, since they were empowered in so many other areas of their lives. Thus the politicians were answerable to them as well. The program is now in effect in four hundred villages, most of which hear one or two cases a month.

Banchte Shekha now has nine area offices and is expanding only very slowly. At this point, the organization feels it can do more good by helping other NGOs, networking with and training organizers, giving demonstrations, and welcoming visitors to the areas.

Most of the organization's funding comes from NORAD; the Norwegian Embassy; an Italian NGO, Public Aid to Development (APS); and the International Center for Living Aquatic Resources Management (ICLARM). There is also a donor consortium made up of the Asia Foundation and USAID that gives specifically to the Democracy and Political Education Program of Banchte Shekha. Under this program, village people are learning to hold political leaders accountable, forcing them to come up with their political platforms and pledges before elections, and then checking to see whether those promises are kept. If not, those candidates do not get the vote the next time.

But outside funding accounts for only 10 percent of Banchte Shekha's budget. The central organization is otherwise self-sufficient, earning from the training center and special programs that it hosts there for other groups, as well as from the fishery project that it has established there. The local units do not have to contribute to the central organization through either their earnings or their savings. "We don't want that anyway," says Gomes. "It's their money-let them exercise their rights over it."

Banchte Shekha remains open, of course, to new challenges as times change. One of the recent issues has been the trafficking of women into India, especially from the Jessore area in which Gomes lives and works, as it is close to the border. But here again awareness and empowerment have turned the tide for Bangladeshi women, and when one group of women who had been recruited to go to India to work found out what was in store for them, they protested loudly. Today, there is widespread suspicion of recruiters, who must know by now that they are facing a whole new breed of women.

Life is getting better for Bangladeshi women on many fronts. Gomes points out that when she started her work, she was ostracized (or even attacked) for merely noticing the violence committed in the culture against women. But now, she says, even newspapers carry reports of such violence. Women now vote in substantial numbers; in fact, there are (a limited number of) parliamentary positions reserved for women. The government is now offering more free education to girls, up to the tenth class now, but with plans to go up to class twelve.

Of course, Gomes cannot take credit for all these changes, but she can claim to have played a substantial role in them. Governments, after all, do change, and many governments have been under pressure to be more careful in the observation and support of human rights, as well as of democratic opportunities. But when a segment of the population is as beaten down as Bangladeshi women have been, they may not be able to take advantages of such changes when they come. It takes an approach like Gomes's-low key, with a lot of sitting around and talking, telling stories, showing compassion-before women can be moved to assert more control over their lives. It seems change starts most effectively within the person, within his or her self- image, his or her self-respect. Women must know they are human beings, with the rights and the powers of that other class of human beings, men. This is the level Gomes has devoted her life to working on.

But Gomes will not rest easy until all the women of Bangladesh escape the fate of suffering within the patriarchy that she herself escaped.

Susan P. Evangelista

REFERENCES

Asian Development Bank. "Women in Bangladesh: Country Briefing Paper." [Online website] Manila: Asian Development Bank, January 2001. Available from http://www.adb.org/Documents/Books/Country_Briefing_Papers/Women_in-Bangladesh/

Bose, Sugata, and Ayesha Jalal. Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy. London: Routledge, 1998.

Central Intelligence Agency. "The World Fact Book: Bangladesh." [Online website] Washington DC: Central Intelligence Agency, updated December 2004. Available from http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/bg/html

Gomes, Angela. "Asian Women in the Next Millennium: Marking Time or Moving Forward." Paper presented at the Awardee's Forum, Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation, Manila, September 1, 1999.

______. How I Reached. [Autobiography] Jessore, Bangladesh: Banchte Shekha, n.d.

______. Interview by James R. Rush. Tape Recording. Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation, Manila, August 28 and 30, 1999.

Morris, Jennifer. "Behind the Veil: The Changing Face of Women in Bangladesh." In Slant (SIPA students' online quarterly magazine on international affairs). New York: Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs, March 1997. Available from http://www.columbia.edu/cu/sipa/PUBS/SLANT/SPRING97/morris.html

Mullins, Jim, and Alice Boatwright. "Banchte Shekha: Women Helping Women in Bangladesh." Online article available from http://www.jim-mullins.com/Bangladesh.html

Smith-Spark, Laura. "How Did Rape Become a Weapon of War?" Online article in Global Policy Forum website, December 8, 2004, and BBC News [international version], December 8, 2004. Available from http://www.globalpolicy.org/intljustice/general/2004/1208 and http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in/4078677.stm