Five Christian villages in rural Bangladesh are virtually extinct now owing to persecution by Muslims.
Some 400 Christians once lived in five villages near Dhaka’s Nawabgonj area and were spi-ritually tended by the Hasnabad Catholic parish of Dhaka. But now only one Christian woman remains living. Virgin Margarat Gomes, a former schoolteacher, is now the only inhabitant at Nagerkanda in Nawabganj.
The 65-year-old woman now only has the company of 13 cats and five dogs. She has been living alone in the village for the last 24 years, but without the fellow villagers she knew, she has become anguished.
Gomes told her story to Church Militant, explaining that persecution by Muslim “land grabbers” not only decimated her immediate family but became the last straw for other villagers who, already struggling, fled for safer communities instead of fighting to improve the living standards locally.
In Bangladesh, 90% of the people are Muslim while most of the remaining 10% are Hindu and Buddhist. Christians are nearly invisible in the country, comprising less than one-half percent of the population.