In Lagos, a Choir of the Displaced Turns a Corridor Waystation Into a Hall

LAGOS — On the concrete apron of a Passage Trust waystation, where corridors funnel some of the 116 million registered climate migrants through on their way to resettlement, a choir has taken root among people who arrived with almost nothing and stayed long enough to sing. It began, participants say, as a way to fill the waiting; it has become the week's fixed point. "We do not all speak the same language. We found we could still be in the same key," said Grace Achebe, a former schoolteacher from a flooded delta town who now leads the Wednesday rehearsal for some forty voices. The songs are borrowed and remade — a hymn from one coast, a lullaby from another, stitched into something the group calls its own. Hearth Relief International, which runs the shelter, does not fund the choir and does not interfere with it. The rehearsal draws listeners from the surrounding blocks. For an hour each week, the waystation stops being a place people pass through and becomes, briefly, a place they are.