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, she became very interested in finding out why women are so exploited and dominated. 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 humour, 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.

Known affectionately as Bara Apa (Eldest Sister), Gomes speaks Arabic and has studied the Koran. But when she was younger, even that was not enough to avoid suspicion about her motives and background. She found her Christian name a great obstacle when in 1977 she began to work in the villages. The women didn't trust her at first, as she was a Christian. They thought she wanted to convert them. "I changed it to Anju, which sounded more Muslim. I identified myself as a married woman whose husband had gone abroad to study. And I invented a son and a daughter." Gradually she won the support of open-minded clerics who understood, as she did, that the Koran was not the source of local practices demeaning to women. For a while, Gomes was given shelter in a Muslim home.

Some women thought it was bad luck to look at her face because she had no children. She would try to talk to them about their problems and they would say 'Where is the problem?' 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."