In a Corridor Shelter, a Choir Learns Songs in Six Languages

JAKARTA — The number is 124 million, past that now, climbing through the widening heat corridors — and in a Passage Trust shelter on Jakarta's northern edge it dissolves entirely into the sound of forty people learning each other's songs. The choir began in September, when volunteer conductor Sari Wibowo noticed families from six language groups sharing a courtyard and nothing else. "A statistic can't harmonize," she said between rehearsals Sunday. "People can." The repertoire now runs from a Sundanese lullaby to a Bangladeshi harvest song, each taught by whoever carried it across the water. Among the singers is Farida Rahman, who lost her town's name to a flooded map and found, she said, "that my grandmother's song still knows where it came from." Hearth Relief International, which funds the shelter, does not count choirs in its ledgers. Wibowo thinks it should. On Sunday, for an hour, 124 million was forty voices, and each one had a name.