She is everywhere and we only talk about her. After the passage of Cyclone Chido, which devastated Mayotte on the morning of December 14, 2024, sheet metal invaded conversations like the landscape. Omnipresent on the roofs of houses in the small archipelago in the Indian Ocean, it was violently blown over and dispersed in an anarchic manner. Rusty, crumpled, it obstructs the paths, piling up in improvised landfills on the side of the roads. We also see it trapped in the mangrove or wrapped around the trunks of pollarded trees.
In Mayotte, everything is gone, or almost. In this chaos, “the sheet metal has been transformed into a weapon of mass destruction”, assures Claire Galibert. This nurse arrived from mainland France with civil protection, after Chido's visit, and we meet her in a school that has become an accommodation center for affected families, in Kawéni, a district north of Mamoudzou, the capital. from Mayotte.
The association has set up a medical consultation there, while, under a courtyard, teams from the city's hospital center vaccinate children and adults, particularly against tetanus. Among the approximately 5,000 injured by the cyclone (an estimate, necessarily approximate, from the Ministry of the Interior), many are those who suffer from wounds caused by the sheet metal or the screws which fixed it. In the slums, which represent 40% of the population, where children often go barefoot, wounds become infected within a few days.
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