Satish Kalra, single-handedly built Smile Train India into the world’s largest cleft surgery program which today provides more than 50,000 cleft surgeries every single year.

That’s more than 1,000 lives changed every single week.

And the amazing thing is, Satish accomplished this with very little help or support from all of us working at headquarters in New York City.

I can remember when we first hired Satish and we had no program at all in India. He started crisscrossing the country, traveling tens of thousands of miles to the north and the east and the west and the South recruiting cleft surgeons to participate in our program. At the time, no one had ever heard of Smile Train and many surgeons were skeptical.

But few of them could say no to Satish. He could be very charming when he wanted to and very stubborn when he had to. Be set very high standards for quality and safety and he made sure we only recruited the very best for our Smile Train program.

I never realized how big a country India was until I went there and Satish dragged me around virtually the entire country visiting our best partners. It was exhausting but it was exhilarating to see the impressive partner network he had built. Everywhere we went, they would be literally thousands of children with unrepaired clefts, waiting for help at our partner hospitals.

I always loved watching Satish interact with our surgeons, anesthesiologists and other medical professionals on these partner visits. Satish was not a doctor but you would never know it the way he would discuss issues, medical protocols in surgical techniques on these visits. You could tell all of our partners respected and admired him which was a big reason why Smile Train India was so successful.

He worked alone for the first four or five years and it was really something to see. Through sheer determination, an incredible work ethic and a tireless commitment to helping children, Satish scales our surgeries in India from zero up to 50,000 a year.

When our network of partners in India was just too much for him to manage by himself, he put an ad in the paper looking for an assistant. More than 3,000 resumes were submitted and they were of such high quality that Satish hired not just one person but three incredible people. This helped him accelerate the growth of the program and help even more children.

Satish did such a good job with India, we soon promoted him to regional manager for Southern Asia and Africa and then ultimately made him Worldwide Programs manager.

Smile Train would never be where it is today without the many years of hard work and sacrifice by Satish Kalra.

I feel very lucky to have known him and had the chance to work with him.