In the small village in Bangladesh where Angela Gomes grew up

In the small village in Bangladesh where Angela Gomes grew up, women worked hard all day, but, she says, "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."
Like the other girls from her village, Gomes was expected to marry at fourteen and settle down. But she resisted that idea and won a scholarship to a mission school run by the Sisters of Charity in Jessore.

At the Sacred Heart School, Gomes progressed from student to teacher while still in her teens. She began to work with the nuns and Father Ceci, a Xaverian priest whose program for poor people in the slums of Jessore impressed Gomes greatly.

"Through the sisters and Father Ceci, I became very interested in finding out why women are so exploited and dominated," she recalls.

But unlike the nuns, who called the problems of poor village women 'God-given', Gomes believed that these women could learn to help themselves.

"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 an extraordinary mixture of warmth, good humor, strength, and determination. No is never a final answer for her. It took all of her persuasive powers, but within a year she was pursuing her own ideal.

"In 1977, I finally began to work in the villages," she says. "The women didn't trust me at first because I was a Christian. They thought I wanted to convert them. Some women thought it was bad luck to look at my face because I had no children. I would try to talk to them about their problems and they would say 'Where is the problem?' They had all kinds of problems, but only I was aware of them."

Gomes went from village to village, alone and on foot. In each village she was able to find someone to take her in, and, while she was there, she lived, ate, and worked side by side with the women.

"They were my university," she says. "Every woman. Every life. I have learned everything I know from them."

She tried to communicate her vision of a different life for village women: a vision in which they were respected for their contributions, not victims of violence and domination; where they could earn their own living and take care of themselves and their children.

When she had gained their confidence, she talked to the women about the struggle between rich and poor-that the poor always lose-and about the particular problems they faced as women.