"My daughter and I have a shelter but not a drop of water." Desire* lost her home when cyclone Chido destroyed the island of Mayotte. "Everything flooded very quickly," she told InfoMigrants on the phone after managing to get a faint network connection. "It was the neighbors who got me out of there with my daughter."

Hosted by a friend from Cavani, a district of Mamoudzou, the island's capital, this Rwandan asylum seeker fears the worst.

She is struggling to recover from the violence of the storm that hit Mayotte and is barely surviving. "I have a little cash left but we can't go shopping because it's hard to get around. We wash in the river, and for electricity, a neighbor shares his generator so we can recharge our devices," she said.

Desire describes the great desolation that affects the island pulverized by gusts that reached 226 km/h. "There are dozens of homeless people wandering around. People who have nothing left," she explained.

'The water really needs to come back'

Pascal, a Congolese refugee, climbed to the top of a hill overlooking Dembéni to get some network coverage because most of the antennas are still out of service. "I don't have the words to describe what I see," he tells us, not realizing that the desolation affects the entire territory of Mayotte. "Everything is scattered everywhere. People are busy with piles of sheet metal and rebuilding their bangas as best as they can, but they are under the full sun, without water or food," he said.

Pascal has some resources stashed in his accommodation, provided by the Coalia association, which supports refugees on the island. But he is running out of food. "There's not much left in our can. The water really needs to come back to the tap," he said worryingly, "otherwise the next few days are going to be very complicated."

For now, people are helping each other, but he fears that in the face of hunger and thirst, tensions will rise, especially since most of the inhabitants do not even know that humanitarian aid is being delivered to the island. When he learned of the damage that is spreading across the island and the toll of "certainly hundreds of deaths" given by officials, the young man was horrified. "All we see from our windows is an incessant stream of ambulances and not a single rescuer at our side," he told InfoMigrants.

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Fear of going to food distributions

This Wednesday (December 18), the first humanitarian plane arrived on the island with several tons of aid on board, but it will take at least eight days for the deliveries that began on Sunday to translate into concrete distributions in the 17 municipalities of the island to those who have nothing left, according to the outgoing minister of transport. In the meantime, everyone must survive as best they can in this overseas territory.

Traumatized by years of increasingly harsh migration policies, undocumented people, just as they were reluctant to go to shelters before the cyclone, do not want to go to the distribution points for fear of being arrested.

"I don't have documentation so I can't go to the authorities. Imagine if they arrest me and I'm deported? What will happen to my little girl?," the mother said. When water supplies became critically low, irregular migrants did not dare go to the water distribution points for fear of being arrested. Some even refuse to go to the hospital for treatment in case they are checked there.

Each year, more than 25,000 people are deported from Mayotte, more than all the other departments of France combined.

In this context, migrants prefer to remain hidden, even after a cyclone. And the recent statements by Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau have not reassured this public, nor the associations. "We will not be able to rebuild Mayotte without dealing with the migration issue with the greatest determination," he wrote on X.

"It is a scandal," Daniel Gros replied, representative of the Human Rights League in Mayotte. "Communicating in this way while the island is still counting its dead clearly shows how people in an irregular situation are treated in Mayotte."

The migrant advocacy group Cimade stressed meanwhile that "the rights and dignity of all inhabitants of Mayotte, without distinction of origin or administrative status, must be at the heart of the response to the emergency and the reconstruction policy."

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