According to official figures, the human record is 40 dead and 41 missing following the Chido cyclone. A most certainly superior assessment, because the disaster was the most deadly in the slums where a majority of people in an irregular situation live. However, this public is unknown and invisible to the state, which makes work to census the dead even more difficult.
Of our correspondent in Mayotte,
There Back to school on January 27 was expected to find out if the students were going to be back in class. According to the teachers, there were some absent, but it is difficult to always make a direct link with Chido. However, some, like Rayka Madani, will unfortunately never return to school.
The 10 -year -old girl lost her life on December 14, buried under the mud. His family lives in a sheet metal box on the heights of Mamoudzou. That day, in danger under the gusts of wind, the parents decided to leave to take refuge in a hard house, but on the way, a mud flow covered the mother and her daughter. “” I stayed more than an hour in the mud, tells his mother, Kaniza Djamil. I was all alone, I couldn’t help him … I tried, but I did not succeed. The little girl is transferred to the hospital and counted among the 40 dead.
As is the case with this little girl, it was in the slums that the disaster was the deadliest. Faizi Ali, 28, lived in that of Kawéni. When the wind started to blow, he left sheltering his children, but he never returned. “” This is where the wind started. There is the house that fell on us. He wanted to come and pick us up and that’s where the car torn off his stomach, recalls his 24 -year -old wife, Saidati Mohamed. I saw people, they came to pick us up, me and his son, his eldest son. There is someone who came to tell me to be strong, but that my husband was dead. And there, I cried, I cried. »»
To listen to in the international guestCyclone Chido in Mayotte: “The population was not at all prepared”
An official “ridiculous assessment »»
Faizi Ali was in an irregular situation to Mayotte And earned his life of odd jobs, repair of cars, masonry … He too was deducted from the official record because he was transferred to the hospital. But many deaths of “undocumented” people have not been declared, according to many observers. Since they are unknown to the authorities, their relatives have no interest in requesting a death certificate. This parameter makes a precise assessment impossible.
Caroline Fivet is a doctor at the Petite-Terre hospital, she worked on Chido day. The official assessment is ” ridiculous According to her. She herself saw burials when she came home from work with her colleagues. “” We already saw people who were burying their families She testifies.
One of his colleagues, who will be called Martin, confides that fifteen families showed up at the Petite-Terre hospital asking to come and have a death finding in their neighborhood. But the caregivers had the obligation to stay at their workplace. He therefore assumes that they did not wait before burying the bodies.
The prefecture launched a research mission for disappeared people at the end of December, but since its launch, the balance sheet has not progressed.
Read tooThree months after the passage of the Chido cyclone, Mayotte is crumbling under mountains of waste