A Migrant Quarter in Jakarta Throws the Season's Loudest Festival

JAKARTA — In the Tanjung resettlement quarter, where Passage Trust corridors have delivered families from a dozen drowning coastlines, this weekend belonged to a street festival that neighbors have taken to calling the Landing. Cooking fires from four cuisines shared one lane; a choir of new arrivals and old residents sang in three languages at once. The quarter has swelled as registered climate migrants worldwide pushed past 120 million, and the festival — improvised two years ago, now an institution — has become the way a strained neighborhood insists on being more than a statistic. "We are counted by the relief agencies and we are grateful," said organizer Siti Rahmawati, ladling soup to a line that did not shorten. "But a number cannot dance, and tonight we can." Hearth Relief International volunteers worked the edges of the crowd, but for one evening the quarter set its own terms. The migration data will be updated next month, drier and larger. The songs, the organizers said, will be updated too.