She Quit A Dubai Career For Two Shirts And A One-Way Ticket To India

On paper, Sandra Lavie Gojkovic had built the kind of life most people spend decades chasing. Raised and educated in Switzerland, she landed a well-paying corporate job in Dubai, complete with a comfortable apartment, a nice car and the means to travel the world whenever she wanted.

Somewhere between airport lounges and boardrooms, one question refused to leave her alone. ‘Why had I been given so much while so many others had so little?’ Fifteen years ago, that question pushed her to resign from her job, pack almost nothing — two shirts and two pairs of trousers — and board a one-way flight to India with no fixed plan.

She travelled through India largely alone, mostly by train, without a safety net of familiar faces. ‘India was a culture shock, but it also gave me exactly what I had been searching for: simplicity, purpose and perspective,’ she has said of those first weeks.

Her original intention was simply to donate to organisations already working in India. But the more she saw of how some of that work was run, the more she noticed recurring problems — financial mismanagement and projects that never quite delivered. That realisation convinced her to build something of her own instead: transparent, sustainable, and shaped by what local communities actually asked for.

That search eventually led her off the mainland entirely, a two-and-a-half-hour train ride followed by an hour by boat to a remote spot in West Bengal: Sagar Island, home to the ashram of Kapila Muni. She spent time there simply listening before building anything, visiting three villages and sitting with residents to understand what they needed most.

Convincing families to trust a foreign woman with their children’s education wasn’t automatic. She went door to door asking parents to send their children to school. Slowly, one child became ten, and ten became dozens.

Fifteen years later, her organisation runs a free primary school educating 150 children across five classes, while another 120 children in government schools receive tuition support and daily meals. Twenty women have gone through sewing training aimed at building financial independence, part of a broader effort that also raises awareness around domestic violence, child marriage and human trafficking.

‘Material possessions are temporary,’ she has said. ‘They may bring comfort, but they do not bring lasting fulfilment. True purpose comes from serving others.’

Wikimedia Commons/by Mettle30