She Left Switzerland With Two Shirts. Now 150 Children Call Her Their Teacher

Fifteen years ago, Sandra Lavie Gojkovic packed two shirts, two pairs of trousers, and boarded a one-way flight to India. Today, 150 children attend the free primary school she built on a remote island in West Bengal, and her story has quietly become one of the more striking examples of a corporate career abandoned for something else entirely.

Lavie grew up and studied in Switzerland before landing a well-paying corporate job in Dubai — complete with an upscale apartment, a car, and the ability to travel wherever she wanted. What she couldn’t shake was one question: ‘Why had I been given so much while so many others had so little?’

She resigned without a fixed plan and travelled across India largely alone, mostly by train. ‘I had very little, yet I had never been happier,’ she has said of that period, describing it as the first time in her life she felt completely free.

The original idea was to donate money to organisations already working in India. Watching some of that support disappear to mismanagement changed her approach — she decided to build something herself instead, transparent and shaped directly by what local communities said they needed.

That decision led her to Sagar Island, reachable only by a two-and-a-half-hour train ride followed by an hour by boat, and home to the ashram of Kapila Muni. She visited three villages there and spent time simply listening to residents before starting any project, later going door to door to convince parents to enrol their children.

That patience built into what exists today: a free primary school for 150 children across five classes, tuition support and daily meals for another 120 children in government schools, and sewing training for 20 women aimed at financial independence — alongside wider awareness work on domestic violence, child marriage and human trafficking.

‘True purpose comes from serving others, creating opportunities, and standing beside those who have been denied them,’ she has said, fifteen years into a mission she says she plans to continue ‘for as long as I live.’

Wikimedia Commons/by Mettle30