The first airplane Jharna Roy ever boarded was taking her to a workshop in Bengaluru. This was not, strictly speaking, the most important thing that happened there. But it was a good place to begin.

Starting in 2013, Jharna worked as a Community Health Promoter, educating parents, children and patients in her community. When that program ended, Jharna spent most of her working life at Pinaki Ray Eye Foundation in Malda, India, learning the hospital’s particular ways of doing things. She knew its routines, its systems, its rhythms. She knew how to run the outpatient department, manage electronic medical records, and assist in the operating theater. Then, when the hospital’s operating theater supervisor couldn’t attend a Seva workshop, Jharna was asked to go instead.

In Bengaluru, she discovered something: there is rarely just one way to get most anything done.

Doctors were learning from people outside medicine. Colleagues traded experiences. Games were being used to teach skills Jharna had never imagined could be taught in a game. She began to see a whole universe of knowledge adjacent to her own, and that she was allowed to enter it.

She came home inspired. Her first move was to train her coworkers in the quality-improvement projects she had learned about at the workshop. The larger change, however, was harder to put on a checklist. Jharna had learned to believe in herself. Through hard work and resilience, she grew into a trainer who now leads and teaches teams of Ophthalmic Nursing Assistants and Operation Theatre staff in surgical safety, quality improvement, and more.

Perhaps that first flight had done something else, too. It gave Jharna a new sense of what might lie beyond the horizon. Her journey reflects what Seva’s training and leadership development are designed to do: build the confidence and skills of people on the front lines of eye care so they can help others grow, too.