In the Camps, a Radio Choir Sends Its Voices Down the Corridor

AGADEZ — Every night at dusk, a low-power relay strung between two Passage Trust camps carries the same half hour of music down eighty kilometers of corridor, and thousands of people who have lost almost everything else stop to listen to it. The broadcast — a choir of migrants who rehearse between water lines — was started four months ago by Nadia Traoré, a schoolteacher from a town now too dry to teach in. "We could not carry our houses," she said. "We could carry the songs." The relay runs on the same fusion-fed camp grid that powers the pumps; the choir borrows it after the day's work is done. Requests arrive scrawled on ration cards. On Sunday, the hundred-and-twenty-millionth registration passed a few tents away, and the choir marked it without being asked, singing a lullaby in four languages until the corridor, for once, was quiet enough to hear.