Linked with Banchte Shekha – Bangladesh.
She is one of the 1000 women proposed for the Nobel Peace Price 2005.
She says: « They were my university. Every woman. Every life. I have learned everything I know from them », … and: « thousands of helpless women seemed to beckon me to them », … and: « the oppression and insults merely made me more determined to achieve my goal ».
She says also: « They were treated like house servants-underfed, beaten, and mentally tortured. No one respected them, not even themselves. They had no solutions to their problems. Life just went on » … and: « I wanted to find a solution for them, to work on the ‘woman problem’, but everyone-Father Ceci, the sisters, my family-thought I should go back to my own village and get married ».
Angela Gomes is a social worker from Bangladesh. She won the prestigious Magsaysay Award in 1999 for community leadership. She leads the organization Bachte Shekha (Learning to Live) in the Jessore region of the country. It teaches rural women a vast range of income-generating skills, including handicrafts, raising crops, poultry and livestock, fish farming, beekeeping and silk making. Her organization benefits some 20,000 women in at least 400 villages. (wikipedia).
Angela Gomes – Bangladesh
She works for Banchte Shekha.
Her Banchte Shekha organization offers female-empowerment programs to more than 25,000 women in nearly 430 Bangladeshi villages. IN THE EARLY DAYS, Angela Gomes used to borrow a bicycle and pedal alone through the dusty countryside near the Bangladeshi city of Jessore. She would talk to village women, listening to their problems and offering what little help she could. Indignant at this interference in their traditional ways, the menfolk would sometimes hurl rocks at her as she passed. For all the effect they had, they might as well have been throwing ping-pong balls. (full text).
