In the Corridor Towns, a Season of Weddings Held in Borrowed Halls

JAKARTA — The relief statistics count arrivals, beds and liters; they do not count weddings, and this autumn the corridor towns are full of them. In the resettlement districts that have grown up along the Passage Trust corridors, where the summer added new residents by the tens of thousands, community halls booked for aid distribution by day are borrowed for celebrations by night. A Jakarta community organizer, Sri Handayani, keeps two calendars for the same room — one for water deliveries, one for ceremonies. "People did not stop being people because they moved," Handayani said. "They fall in love in a corridor town the same as anywhere." The ceremonies are frugal and improvised: shared kitchens, lent finery, guests who arrived as strangers on the same bus a month ago. Relief workers, who spend their days measuring scarcity, describe the evenings as a needed correction. The corridor, Handayani said, is not only a place people pass through. For a growing number, it is where a life begins.