Meet The Swiss Expat Who Traded Luxury For A Remote Bengal Island

Sandra Lavie Gojkovic’s old life is easy to picture: Swiss-educated, a well-paying corporate job in Dubai, an upscale apartment, a car, and enough disposable income to travel internationally whenever she wanted. Her current one, fifteen years on, looks nothing like it.

The shift began with a single, uncomfortable question she couldn’t shake off between meetings: ‘Why had I been given so much while so many others had so little?’ She resigned, packed two shirts and two pairs of trousers, and flew to India on a one-way ticket without a set plan.

What followed was a solo trip across the country, mostly by train, with none of the safety net she had left behind. ‘I explored India alone by train, a bit crazy now that I think back, and for the first time in my life, I felt completely free,’ she has said. ‘I had very little, yet I had never been happier.’

She hadn’t set out to build her own organisation — the original plan was to financially support ones that already existed. It was after seeing recurring mismanagement in that space that she decided to start something of her own instead, built around what communities actually said they needed rather than what looked impressive on paper.

That path led to Sagar Island, a remote part of West Bengal reachable by a two-and-a-half-hour train ride and an hour by boat, home to the ashram of Kapila Muni. She visited three villages there and spent time listening before deciding what to build, and later went door to door convincing wary parents to send their children to school.

Today, her organisation runs a free primary school for 150 children across five classes, supports another 120 children in government schools with tuition and daily meals, and has trained 20 women in sewing as a route to financial independence — alongside broader work raising awareness of domestic violence, child marriage and human trafficking.

‘Material possessions are temporary,’ she has said of the trade-off. ‘They may bring comfort, but they do not bring lasting fulfilment.’

Wikimedia Commons/by Mettle30