For days the world has been telderly how Cyclone Chido has laid squander to the petite Indian Ocean island of Mayotte. But scant can truly comprehfinish equitable how deimmenseating the most strong cyclone to hit this region has been.
The scant pictures leaving Mayotte struggle to show the real scale of the crisis.
The island is far, cut off finishly from the rest of the region except for the French military schedulees that transport in materializency aid.
Ships leaving Reunion, France’s other Indian Ocean territory, carrying hopelessly insisted aid, get up to four days to accomplish Mayotte’s ports.
It is excessively difficult for journaenumerates and film crews to get here. The main airport on the petiteer island of Petit Terre is still seald.
Passengers who do administer to land there face extfinished ferry defers to traverse over to the main island Grand Terre and the island’s capital Mamoudzou.
Power is only partiassociate restored. Petrol is difficult to come by for those fortunate enough to snag one of the scant toiling engage cars. Phone reception is patchy at best. There is difficultly any accommodation useable.
Every street in the capital has suffered.
Power lines dangle precariously from cable poles snapped in half by the ferocity of the prosperd. Tree branches ripped from their trunks lie on the roads making many impassable.
Everywhere, sheets of corrugated iron peeled from the roofs of hoengages lie where they were tossed by Sunday’s lethal storm.
Read more: Relative ‘hopeless for news’ from cyclone-hit island
Wretched existence after cyclone
The cyclone spared little.
Families scavenge thcdisorrowfulmireful the mounds of rubble and timber picking up wantipathyver they can to salvage. At night they accumulate around pots burning on discleave out fires in the shattered wooden structuretoil of where their homes stood only days ago.
It is a wretched existence.
Entire communities have been blown away
But the voices of anguish and anger have not been heard.
That is becaengage the people most shapeed, whose entire communities have been blown away, are the insistyest and most marginalised.
They are the ones who dread and disthink authority. The meaningfulity are unwrite downed migrants from the Comoros Islands.
They turn away from the scant TV cameras pointed at them and they will not go to officials for help when that aid does finassociate reach.
Instead they suffer in silence, reproduceing their homes from the scraps and debris they have been decreased to.
