From Boardrooms To Sagar Island: Inside Sandra Lavie’s Quiet 15-Year Revolution
Fifteen years after leaving a Dubai corporate career, Sandra Lavie Gojkovic's school on Sagar Island now educates 150 children and trains 20 women in new skills.
It has been fifteen years since Sandra Lavie Gojkovic resigned from a well-paying corporate job in Dubai, packed two shirts and two pairs of trousers, and flew to India on a one-way ticket with no fixed plan. The project she eventually built on a remote island in West Bengal has since grown well beyond what she originally imagined.
Lavie, who is Swiss, had reached a point most people are told to aim for: an upscale apartment, a car, steady income and the freedom to travel. What she hadn’t reached was an answer to one recurring question — ‘Why had I been given so much while so many others had so little?’
She initially planned only to donate money to organisations already doing the work in India. It was watching some of that support get lost to mismanagement that changed her mind. ‘I discovered recurring issues, including financial mismanagement and ineffective development work,’ she has said. ‘That made me realise I wanted to create something myself.’
The place she eventually settled on wasn’t easy to reach: a two-and-a-half-hour train ride followed by an hour by boat, to Sagar Island, home to the ashram of Kapila Muni. Rather than arrive with a plan already decided, she visited three villages there and simply listened to residents first.
Getting families to enrol their children wasn’t automatic either. She went door to door, house by house, asking parents to trust a foreign woman with their children’s schooling. That patience has compounded: her organisation now runs a free primary school for 150 children across five classes, provides tuition support and daily meals to another 120 children in government schools, and has trained 20 women in sewing as a path to financial independence.
The work has since widened to include awareness campaigns on domestic violence, child marriage and human trafficking, alongside the core education programme. She traces some of her drive back to her own childhood, travelling frequently with her parents and being exposed early to different cultures and places.
‘Helping people who are less fortunate is not simply something I do,’ she has said. ‘It is my life’s mission. I will continue this work for as long as I live.’
Wikimedia Commons/by Mettle30
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