In a Receiving Town, a School Choir Sings in Nine Languages

NOVA KIGALI RECEIVING TOWN — The newest institution in this fast-growing receiving town is not a court or a clinic but a choir. In a school assembled from modular halls, forty children who arrived this summer from a dozen countries have learned to sing together in nine languages, one verse handed off to the next like water passed down a line. "They cannot all talk to each other yet, but they can sing to each other," said Amara Nsengimana, the music teacher who started the choir in June with a borrowed keyboard and no shared tongue. The town has added a whole district since spring, its population swelling with the summer's movers, and its social fabric has had to be improvised as quickly as its streets. The choir, Nsengimana said, is where the improvising becomes something people choose to keep. On Monday they rehearsed a song none of them knew three months ago, in a language none of them fully shares.