This Sunday, Cyclone Chido caused devastating damage in the Mayotte Islands archipelago (320,000 inhabitants), a French overseas region, which is located north of the Mozambique Channel, north of Madagascar, in the Indian Ocean. The prefect of the State fears the death of hundreds or thousands of extremely poor men and women.
By mid-afternoon on Sunday, 14 people were certified dead and 250 injured. “Risory” figures, it is feared that they are very far from deep reality. François-Xavier Bieuville, prefect, representative of the State in the poorest department in France, declared: «It will be very difficult to draw a final balance, disastrous and dramatic. The customs of the families, in the most modest neighborhoods, with a Muslim majority, want the missing to be buried very quickly, even before twenty-four hours after death. Therefore, even the expected aid will arrive too late to help and establish a real balance of the drama, the unprecedented catastrophe.
According to Météo-France, the official meteorological service, Chido has been the most devastating cyclone to hit the Mayotte islands since 1934, leaving, in its wake, a gloomy landscape… More than fifteen thousand families have lost all their property. Entire neighborhoods disappeared, hospitals, roads, public buildings collapsed, tens of thousands of trees uprooted, desolate fields with tens of thousands of animals sacrificed, absolute cutoff of water and electricity services. A large part of the population of the archipelago lives in conditions of the most extreme poverty, in shacks without services, razed in thousands of cases, when they have not disappeared, burying men, women, children, perhaps entire families, in their rubble, completely isolated, without possible help.
From Paris, the resigned interim Minister of the Interior, Bruno Retailleau, announced late Sunday morning the dispatch of 800 firefighters, gendarmes and soldiers to provide emergency relief. Many local observers fear that help will come too late, in many cases.
Conditions of great poverty
In tears, a forty-year-old woman who had lost everything, husband, children, family, house, declared to French TV, mid-afternoon on Sunday: «Many of us have lost everything. We had nothing. We lived in shanties. The cyclone has taken everything, everything. I have been left alone, alone, alone. I have nowhere to fall dead. Around me, everything is ruins and death.
Nearly 200,000 of the 320,000 inhabitants of the archipelago live in conditions of great poverty, the highest and most dramatic in all of France, metropolitan and overseas. Mayotte, like other peripheral French territories, could not live without the permanent help of the French State.
Many of the victims were French of Muslim religion and a very diverse ethnic origin, with traditions that will complicate the final balance of the tragedy. With highways, roads and means of communication destroyed, many families may not wait for the arrival of emergency aid to bury their dead, in conditions as precarious as they are dramatic, in absolute solitude.
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