A Migrant Choir in Jakarta Sings the Songs of Places Half Underwater

JAKARTA — On a warm Thursday evening in a Passage Trust resettlement district, four dozen voices gathered in a repurposed warehouse to rehearse songs from coastlines their singers had left behind. The choir draws from families among the registered climate migrants now numbering past 112 million worldwide — people who arrived from drowning shorelines across the region and found, in shared melody, a language the paperwork could not provide. "We do not sing to be sad," said choir organizer Sari Wulandari, who fled a Sumatran fishing town two years ago. "We sing so the young ones know the name of the water we came from." The repertoire mixes fishing chants, lullabies, and a few newer songs written in the district itself — grief and arrival braided together. A Hearth Relief International coordinator who helped find the hall said the choir has done more for the district's mood than any program she could fund. On performance nights, she said, the neighborhood remembers it is a neighborhood.