Our mission is to raise awareness and to educate people about the history and challenges faced by the refugee and immigrants population through short films and blog posts. We hope to engage youth in community issues and programs as well as inform the public about the experiences of refugee and immigrant communities.

Who We Are

We are a group of youth in Pittsburgh who want to show the world that despite being displaced and sometimes forgotten, we have not forgotten who we are and what we have to offer the world. Our story is one of survival and of hope. We may be the Children of Shangri-Lost, but we have found ourselves in our new homes around the world.

What We Do

1) We blog about community issues with guest writers from Pittsburgh and beyond

2) We create a series of short videos to share experiences, stories, and accounts by the Bhutanese and other refugee populations

3) We are working on a feature-length documentary about the Bhutanese refugee experience both in Bhutan and Nepal as well as post-resettlement

4) We promote story-telling and presentations about the Bhutanese refugee experience, including screening videos that we have created

What does the Children of Shangri-Lost mean?

We are the children of ‘Shangri-Lost,’ the tiny Himalayan country of Bhutan, known for its notorious human rights record and its practice of ethnic cleansing. As children born in refugee camps in Nepal to parents who were forcefully evicted in the early 1990s, we shoulder the responsibility to tell our stories to our younger peers and our friends in our new country- stories about our parents, who were thrown out of their beloved country for speaking out against injustice. While Shangri-La is a term used in the West because of a lack of knowledge about our ancestral country, we thought that Shangri-Lost is an apt term to use for our country, which is crying for its lost children.

We are a group of young Bhutanese children lost in the world, experiencing the identity crisis of being ethnically Nepali on one hand, and Bhutanese by origin and injustice, on the other. Our young generation finds itself trapped in the Bhutanese regime’s narrative that we are from Nepal, a narrative used to justify throwing us out, accused of being illegal immigrants.  As more and more illegal immigrants are being manufactured by corrupt regimes around the world, the pain of lost identity among these so-called illegal immigrants has prompted us to face reality and build new lives elsewhere. The only other option for us would have been enduring the violence perpetrated by our rulers, while rest of the world witnessed our tragedies. We are witnesses to similar injustices committed against children in war-torn countries, who get no second chance to tell their stories.

We are unlucky to have been evicted from our home, but lucky to be alive to tell our stories of lost identity- therefore making us the Children of Shangri-Lost.