In Jakarta, a Choir of Migrants Sings the Songs of Drowned Streets

JAKARTA — On a humid Tuesday evening in a borrowed community hall, forty-odd voices rehearse a lullaby from a coastal village that the sea took three years ago. The singers are among the climate migrants who continue to arrive along the region's corridors — a movement now past 120 million registered people worldwide and still climbing through the autumn. The choir, organized with help from Passage Trust caseworkers, began as a way to fill the long empty hours of resettlement and became something its members did not expect: an archive. "When a place goes underwater, its songs go with it unless someone keeps singing them," said Ratna Wijaya, a former schoolteacher who conducts. She keeps a notebook of melodies collected from newcomers, some the last living record of a dialect's music. The hall is not soundproof; neighbors have started leaving their windows open. What began as consolation for the displaced has become, quietly, a gift to the city that received them.