“This was a beautiful neighborhood before. Now it’s a disaster. » In the middle of all the debris and his surviving furniture, Mounira Ahmed, 42, shows the apocalypse with a circular gesture. Perched at the top of one of the hills in the Karidjavendza district, his family’s nine sheet metal huts overlooked all the shanty towns of Kawéni, with a breathtaking view of Petite-Terre and the lagoon. This advantageous position left them cruelly exposed to wind gusts of more than 200 km/h. The eye of the cyclone passed very close to this town located on the western outskirts of the capital of Mayotte, Mamoudzou. “It looks like the images of the Hiroshima bomb [au Japon, en 1945]non ? »describes, disappointed, this mother of three children, originally from Anjouan, in the Comoros, pointing to these green hills that have turned brown, in a sort of Mahorese winter that no one would have imagined.
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Around this hill, Chido leveled the huts, but did not take any lives. “Here, we all know each other, we know that no one has disappeared,” reassures the mother of three children. The provisional toll from the disaster, probably greatly underestimated according to the authorities, stands at 31 dead and 2,100 injured.
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