The 1999 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership

RESPONSE of Angela Gomes

Your Excellency, President Joseph Ejercito Estrada, First Lady, Members of the Magsaysay family, distinguished guests, trustees, fellow awardees, ladies and gentlemen:

It is a great honor and privilege for me to receive the Ramon Magsaysay Award. But I must share the credit with the women of Banchte Shekha (“Learn to Survive”), the organization I founded to help rural women stand on their own two feet.

When I started teaching in school after college I began to travel in the villages of Jessore District. I saw the tears of suffering women who were victims of dowry abuse. I met women beaten up by their husbands or in-laws, mothers deprived of their motherhood because of the husbands’ insistence on ligation, women who were cast aside through illegal divorce. I saw women treated not as human beings but as commodities, less dignified than animals. I felt compassion for them and from late 1975 began to do something to help them.

I started work 23 years ago among rural women who were oppressed, destitute, depressed, dominated, exploited, neglected and backward. They were not educated, not aware, not capable of taking decisions - only a hostile environment prevailed around them. I had to face criminal cases lodged against me by troublemaker people of the villages. They claimed that I am destroying the social system by bringing the women out of their homes. They did it because it was against their own interest in controlling the women. They did not want women to become educated, to come out of their homes, to take up income generating work, to become conscious of their situation and try to do something to correct it.

There are few bad people in our society but most are good, honest and truthful. They are willing to help support the struggle against injustices when they learn the facts and when they are organized to give help as a group. The Honorable Prime Minister has quoted “you have worked tirelessly to give smiles to the deprived and oppressed women of Bangladesh risking your own life.”

I wish that everyone would have the faith to be the source of power, moral strength and courage. I have been so taken up with women’s issues that I have never thought of having any family life. The people with whom I am working are my family and the children for whom I tried to do something for their education, they are my children.

The great leader who is remembered with honour and dignity by the people of Asia along with Filipinos who keep the memory unfaded. I extend my heartful felicitations and deep respect on behalf of the backward rural women of Bangladesh.

Today’s awarding ceremony added a new chapter to my experience which is full of both sorrow and happiness and this will inspire and energize me for my future activities.

With the news of this award, the destitute, depressed, dominated, exploited, neglected, and backward rural women deprived of their rights and for whom I had been working for the last 23 years flashed before my eyes. I can’t but remember their faces while I am receiving this award. I am dedicating this award in their memory.

I thank everyone who has helped me in any way to achieve this honour and wish to have the blessing to continue my work until I reach my last. I would like to conclude with a little poem of mine, translated from the original Bengali:

Tell me, friend
For what does life and youth pass away?
With a heavy load on the heart let life find a way.
In the next moment my mind said:
Only after the slow decaying of the seed
Does the new fruit and the beautiful tree breed.
For ages humanity will breathe fresh air
And all will enjoy that fruit of my labor
Millions of human beings with the fruit enjoy
Let me sow the seeds of the future in pure joy.

Thank you.