“It’s chaos,” summed up medical and administrative assistant Anrifia Ali Hamadi.
“The roof is collapsing. We’re not very safe. Even I don’t feel safe here.”
Perched on a cliffside overhanging the capital Mamoudzou, the hospital offers a fine vantage point from which to view the vast wreckage Cyclone Chido wrought when it barrelled into the French Indian Ocean territory.
Despite its blown-out windows and doors ripped off their hinges, most of the hospital’s medics have taken to sleeping at their battered workplace as the storm had swept their homes away, Hamadi said.
As best as they could, its doctors and nurses have kept calm and kept working — some without a pause since the cyclone made landfall on Saturday.
That day four women gave birth even as the worst gale to hit Mayotte in a century raged outside, said the hospital’s head of obstetrics Roger Serhal.
One needed a caesarean, but the operating theatre was flooded — forcing the medics to chance a natural delivery.
Luckily the baby was born healthy after what Serhal called “a lot of effort and a bit of risk”.
Lack of medicine
Four days on, entire sections of the Mamoudzou hospital are still out of action.
In the high-risk pregnancies section of its maternity ward — France’s largest with around 10,000 births a year — electricians raced to restore the rooms to their proper state, in the near-indifference of expectant mothers and their carers.
