In the village world of Bangladesh, a cruel code governs the lives of women. In a society already poor, women are poorer than men. A woman who is widowed, or who is divorced, or whose husband has abandoned her, is often left to fend for herself. When a woman lodges charges of desertion, assault, or rape against a man, those who determine her fate are men. In every way, a woman is less than a man. A great number of Bangladeshi women accept this as the natural order of things. ANGELA GOMES, founder of Banchte Shekha, does not.
A Christian in largely Muslim Bangladesh, GOMES was raised in a small village near Dhaka. Resisting an early marriage, she became a teacher at Sacred Heart School in Jessore and was there drawn into Catholic charity work in the city slums. The destitute women she met there—abandoned and abused women cast off from neighboring villages—deeply disturbed her. She decided to do something.
Walking from village to village in the outskirts of Jessore, GOMES began talking to women and learning from them. In 1977, she began forming women into small groups and teaching them how to make jute crafts and other products to sell. Then she taught them how to raise chickens and how to make fishponds and how to grow mulberry trees—having to learn all these things beforehand herself. Word of each small success spread from village to village. And soon, says GOMES, “Thousands of helpless women seemed to beckon me to them.”
As she worked alongside village women, GOMES also spoke about the problems they faced as women. “Eventually,” she says, “they were able to see the thread connecting food, work, education, and rights.”
GOMES studied the Koran and comported herself in proper Muslim fashion. And gradually, she won the support of open-minded Muslim clerics who understood, as she did, that the Koran was not the source of local practices demeaning to women. But she was not welcome everywhere. As an outsider who stirred women to action, she was harassed and pelted with rocks and excrement. To protect her little movement, in 1981 GOMES registered it as a foundation: Banchte Shekha, or Learn to Survive.
GOMES gained financial backing from international NGOs and guided Banchte Shekha into new endeavors. Its members formed village credit societies and became birth attendants, barefoot veterinarians, and community organizers, as well as sources of practical knowledge about health care, family planning, and nutrition.
In 1987, GOMES began training a team of paralegals in Muslim law and relevant legal procedures. As a result, in many villages today, cases involving domestic violence, dowry abuses, child support, and other gender-related conflicts are deliberated in public by arbitration panels convened and trained by Banchte Shekha’s paralegals, instead of by traditional all-male mediation councils.
Banchte Shekha now operates from a 1.5-hectare training complex in Jessore, which accommodates two hundred live-in trainees and also serves as a women’s shelter. Twenty-five thousand women in 750 village-based organizations are active members. GOMES estimates that over two hundred thousand people benefit indirectly from Banchte Shekha’s comprehensive interventions in village life. Through its gender-awareness training and legal innovations, women and men alike are making their way slowly to a new era of gender equality.
This is her great hope. Known for her dogged persistence and hearty laughter, ANGELA GOMES reminds us, “The problems of poor women in Bangladesh have been centuries in the making.” But Banchte Shekha’s successes are hopeful. And, she says, “Every day is a new day.”
In electing ANGELA GOMES to receive the 1999 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership, the board of trustees recognizes her helping rural Bangladeshi women assert their rights to better livelihoods and to gender equality, under the law and in everyday life.
