Anli Djamadar has been from Mahor and Nantes for several years. Three weeks after the passage of Cyclone Chido, he arrived on the island to relay his colleagues from Mayotte La Première. He told us his first impressions.
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“Frankly, I have no words to describe the disaster. I am truly shocked”describe Anli Djamadar, our IT colleague from France 3 Pays de la Loire, a few hours after his arrival in Mayotte.
“You look into the distance, and as far as the eye can see, instead of seeing trees, you only see silhouettes of trees, as if there had been a big fire that had cleared everything.”
In this chaos, Anli, from Mahor and Nantes since 2019, finds a little hope. “It’s slowly starting to grow back, the trees have started to green up. But believe me, the fauna and flora suffered greatly from the disaster.”
Along the road north he took to reach his family, he describes open-air dumps everywhere. “I don't know how long it's going to take to clear all this. It's going to be a truly massive clean-up operation.”
In his village in Mtsahara, there is still no electricity or mobile network and “people live to the rhythm of water cuts”.
ALSO READ. “Think of us for the coming weeks”, the call for help from the rural populations of Mayotte
“I was able to see my grandmother and my mother. Everyone is fine, but everyone is scarred, shockedsays Anli. “All the people you meet in the street tell you how they experienced the cyclone“.
If the Mahorais show immense resilience, the trauma is very present. “You have to accept deep down inside yourself. But it's really very heavy. You can't imagineconfides our colleague.
When he questions his compatriots about the hours following the passage of the deadly cyclone, they all respond “to have been lucky to survive”.
Anli left for a one-month mission to support the Mayotte La Première teams, whose premises were partially devastated by Cyclone Chido. Despite difficult conditions, television teams continued to broadcast television news every day from the basement of the building.
“Colleagues need to breathe. They too had damage at home, but they continued to come to work”says Anli, who knows the station well having worked there for ten years.
In Mayotte, it is now time for reconstruction. On the hills, “there is blue-green, blue-white”the boxes are back, “to be able to live, to have a roof over your head”.
