HIMALAYAN FOUNDATION-USA
The Himalayan Foundation-USA is a Pittsburgh based, 501(c)3, non-profit formed in 2016 with the primary objective to provide quality-of-life enhancing services to the most vulnerable segments of the Bhutanese immigrant/refugee community in Southwestern Pennsylvania. The Himalayan Foundation-USA defines the vulnerable population as the elderly, individuals with disabilities, individuals without immediate family support and children as they acclimate to their new environment educationally and socially.
Support, Educate and Preserve
We also exist to ensure the preservation of the Himalayan history and culture. As our youth acclimate to their new society, language and traditions and culture are rapidly being lost. Communication breakdown is also occurring within family units and the elders can no longer communicate with their English-speaking grandchildren. We as an organization strive to keep this culture alive by providing Nepali dance, language, art and music classes to the children, adult dance classes and an annual Cultural Program.
Long-term goals are to have our own physical space where we can offer all activities and programming, senior “daycare” and a museum to preserve our history, stories, artifacts and culture forever. And as we grow as an organization, our hope is to expand our services throughout Pennsylvania and the tri-state area and to other populations in need. We are a 100% volunteer organization working tirelessly to achieve these goals.
These paintings are done from my memories and are based on our common stories. Every person from our community can explain my paintings. I am depicting our memories so that by remembering our past we can see the future.
— R K Rai
R K Rai, Getting ready to board the bus that takes us to new countries. Acrylic on canvas.
Image Description: A crowd of young boys in the foreground fades to a crowd of various ages of people waving to the waving hands of the people on board of a large white bus with an open door and the large blue letters of “I O M.” The background shows the tops of wooden stick houses and the leaves of banana trees. The boy most in the foreground is looking back to the left, with a worried expression on his face, while everyone else in the crow looks forward to the right.
Bhutanese Nepali-Bhutan to USA
Evicted/Fled from Bhutan to Nepal: 1991-1993
Lived in the Refugee Camps in Nepal: 1991-2013
Nepal to third country of resettlement: 2008-2013
My mother at work. Common job in camp to earn little money. Most people worked.
RK Rai, Himalayan Foundation. My mother at work. Common job in camp to earn little money. Most people worked. Acrylic on canvas.
Image Description: Painting of older mother with gray head scarf, dark glasses, blue blouse, and other skirt layers, spinning thread with her hands and foot with a wooden ground wheel that attaches to a large spool of white thread. There is a small portable tv on top of large sacks and baskets of rice, plastic water containers, and other food holders to the right of her. Three small children in various shirts and pants of red, biege, and purple, stare at us from the left of the painting. Behind them is the village woven stick homes and banana tree and other green foliage.
Our common ways of roofing and other activities.
RK Rai, Himalayan Foundation, Our common ways of roofing and other activities. Acrylic on canvas.
Image Description: Aerial view looking down on the tops of the village homes. People in bright colors of yellow, red, blue, black, and green are in various stages of roofing the homes by pulling the thatched reeds/sticks over the gridded roof support beams. There is also a large shiny satellite dish in the lower left foreground. A metal stove is being used by a single person to the lower left as steam rises from it. Behind the four rows of rooves, fog rises above the jungle.
Rajen Gurung, Acrylic on canvas. Courtesy of the Himalayan Foundation Museum.
Image Description: Painting of a mother with long black hair and a bright pink shirt who’s grooming her child’s hair as the child looks toward us, relaxing for a moment in her lap.
Rajen Gurung, Oil on canvas. Courtesy of the Himalayan Foundation Museum.
Image Description: Two people sitting together with a small child between them: one in blue on a twisted reed circle stool, the other in green with a red hat, sitting on some mats, as the child in blue plays as the sun and shadow cast on their back. Behind them is the front of a thatched wooden home with some colorful laundry hanging and an open doorway. The trunk of a young tree rises from the right.
Rajen Gurung, Acrylic on canvas. Courtesy of the Himalayan Foundation Museum.
Image Description: Three people harvesting in a yellow grassy field, with the Himalayan ice-capped mountains rising behind them. The one on the left wears a red head wrap, purple sweater, and yellow sarong. The two on the right have their baskets with bands that fall across their blue and red head wraps for carrying the harvest home. Talls stalks of reeds rise in the field and there are green trees in the middle background in front of the mountains.
Aimbee Rai, Oil on canvas.
Image Description: Woman in red sari wrapped over the black, gold ornamented base dress. She wears a red beaded necklace, a smaller gold heart necklace, and a large gold square pendent. Her right arm is akimbo, with a golden bracelet. She smiles with neat dark hair pulled back, kind eyes, a bright red bindi, and bright red lipstick. In the background, a sketch shadow of her inclines her head to the side with a more serious expression. The sketch shadow of her has no color except for the bright red bindi.
Aimbee Rai, Oil on canvas. 2024.
Image Description: Three children hugging one another in big bear hugs that are so big they pull the smiling girl in the front down onto the waist of the middle girl. The two girls’ long dark hair cascades down around their faces and they are in white and light gray and pink long-sleeved clothing. The boy behind them has his arm around the shoulder of the middle girl. He wears deep, dark red clothing with a hood that covers the top of his head.
Aimbee Rai, Oil on canvas. 2016.
Image Description: Man with light brown stylish blowy bowl cut looks straight at us, holding a flat basket of a roasted chicken with a long curved knife to cut it with. He is wearing a black double-breast-pocketed jacket. Behind him is a concrete and grassed yard with a three legged black spherical grill with steam rising out of it. A vertical slatted wooden fence separates the yard from a blue American house and trees in the background. His eyes are expressive, earnest, eager to offer, a little shy or sad, perhaps.