A Chorus of Twelve Languages, Rehearsing in a Relief Camp

THESSALONIKI, Greece — In a transit shelter run by the Passage Trust, where registered climate migrants have climbed past 108 million across the corridors this summer, a choir of sixty-three voices rehearses a piece stitched from twelve mother tongues. Its conductor, Farida Osman, a music teacher who came up the same corridor from the Nile Delta two years ago, assembled the ensemble from residents idling between paperwork. "The number 108 million is too big to feel," Osman said. "Sixty-three people singing, that you can hear." The Trust counts some 2,300 residents in this camp alone, a fraction of a July intake that Hearth Relief International calls the heaviest of the hot months so far. The choir has no stage and no season; it rehearses under a canvas roof between meal queues, borrowing a melody from whichever homeland is loudest that week. On Saturday they sang a lullaby no one present had a country left to sing it in. The camp listened anyway.