By Tassilo Hummel
People in storm-ravaged Mayotte urged French President Emmanuel Macron to do more to help on Thursday as he toured the overseas region where many people are feared dead in the devastation left by Typhoon Chido.
Some in the crowd gathered outside the airport resisted the president's car, while others said they appreciated Macron's visit and urged him to stay longer.
French officials have been able to confirm the death toll of 31 people over five days after the storm, but others fear there could be thousands. The representative told Macron that some of the victims were buried in graves. Reuters could not immediately confirm that.
Many places remain inaccessible. Heavy rains in the capital Mamoudzou and other regions have deepened the suffering of thousands of people whose houses have been displaced.
As Macron disembarked from the plane carrying food and medical aid, airport staff called for support.
“Take your time. Stay with us. Give us solutions,” an airport security worker named Assane Haloi told him. “We have given emergency aid, because in Mayotte, there is nothing.”
Macron's office said he would stay on the islands overnight and visit neighbors on Friday. It was not immediately clear how long he would stay.
His government has been accused by opposition politicians of neglecting Mayotte, and many residents of the impoverished area told Reuters they had received no aid since Chido's coup.
“Your services are strange,” one man at the hospital told Macron in a testy exchange. “Help hasn't arrived where I live.”
Macron said his government would soon send additional support, including 400 more gendarmes to ensure security, and noted the influx of food and water arriving by air and sea.
“We all have to come together, since day one, people have been gathering day and night, let's not divide each other,” he said.
MANNER OF DEATH UNCLEAR
Authorities have warned that it will be difficult to determine how many people have died in the area, which has a large population from Comoros, Madagascar and other countries. Official statistics put Mayotte's population at 321,000, but many say it is much higher.
Some victims were quickly buried, in accordance with Islamic tradition, before their deaths were counted.
Health workers say they are expecting an outbreak of disease as the bodies have not yet been buried and people are struggling to get clean drinking water.
“We are facing open graves, no rescuers, no one to collect the bodies,” Estelle Youssoufa, who represents Mayotte in the national parliament, told Macron. He did not say where the graves were.
Residents of Mayotte crowded water points and wells to fill jars and buckets. Others did laundry or bathed in rivers.
“When we got here it was destroyed, nothing is standing,” El-Yassine Ibrahim told Reuters in Doujani, a poor area south of Mamoudzou.
“Everything was destroyed. Since then, little by little, we've been sorting and collecting things, and we'll see what we're going to do next,” he said, as his friends piled up the rubble.
Three out of four people in Mayotte live below the national poverty line. While it exports vanilla, coffee and cinnamon, it remains heavily dependent on support from metropolitan France and attracts few tourists.
“All the pipes are broken everywhere, there is no water in Mayotte. We need water to do housework, to cook, to wash, to wash. To drink water, we buy it from the shops,” Zalahta M'Madi. 44, he said.
“No one is telling us if the water will come back tomorrow or tomorrow or after a month. We are all worried.”
The death toll on the African continent, where the storm hit after passing Mayotte, stood at 45 in Mozambique and 13 in Malawi, officials said.