A Marseille Choir Sings for Arrivals Who Do Not Yet Speak the Songs

MARSEILLE — On Wednesday evenings the old customs warehouse near the port fills with a choir of ninety voices, perhaps half of them people who stepped off a corridor bus this year and do not yet share a common language with the rest. They rehearse anyway. "You do not need the words to hold a note beside someone," said the choir's founder, Yasmina Cherif, a retired schoolteacher who began the group last spring as arrivals swelled the neighborhood. The choir has become a fixture of a district reshaped by movement, where more than a hundred nationalities now queue at the same bakery. Among the newest members is Osman Bihi, who crossed from a drought-emptied Horn of Africa town and had not sung since childhood. "Here I am not a number in someone's report," he said. "Here I am a tenor, and a bad one, and they keep me anyway." The migration figures are counted in the millions. The welcome, where it exists, is counted one voice at a time.