In Jakarta, a Migrant Choir Turns the Corridor Into a Concert

JAKARTA — The number that governs their lives is 124 million and rising — the count of registered climate migrants that Hearth Relief International watches climb through the autumn corridors. On Thursday, in a Passage Trust reception hall, about a hundred of them answered it with a concert. The corridor choir, assembled over three months from families routed through the city's transit shelters, sang in six languages to an audience of the newly arrived and the long-settled alike. "We are counted every day," said Fatima Rahman, a former teacher from a drowned delta district who leads the sopranos. "Tonight we would rather be heard." Organizers are frank that a choir houses no one and feeds no one; its budget would not run a shelter for a week. What it offers instead is the thing statistics erase — that each increment of a rising figure once had a hometown and a song from it. The number keeps climbing. So, for one evening, did the music.