A Jakarta Choir Sings for the Water That Finally Reached the Kampung

JAKARTA — On Friday evening in the kampung of Penjaringan, a neighborhood that has spent this century learning to live braced against the sea, a children's choir rehearsed an old folk song about waiting for rain — and changed the last verse. The alteration was the idea of music teacher Sari Dewi, who runs the choir out of a community hall raised a meter on stilts. "The song asks the sky for water," Dewi said. "This year the water came from a pipe, not the sky, so the children wanted to thank the pipe." The revised verse names the standpipe that a relief corridor brought to their lane in the spring. Cultural purists have grumbled; Dewi is unbothered. Across a summer in which the global temperature anomaly holds at plus 2.8 degrees and coastal neighborhoods everywhere improvise their small ceremonies of adaptation, a rewritten verse is its own quiet document. "A song remembers what a year was really about," Dewi said. "This year it was about the tap."