The fight of Mahorais high school students to succeed in mainland France

Aïda’s face lights up. Seated with a Bordeaux terrace, she stings a piece of throb on her plate, evoking with her sister Soraya the Mahorais dishes that she has not tasted for four months. Coconut rice, Sunday skewers… Mayotte is missing.

The 17 -year -old high school student left her archipelago in early January to pass the bac in Bordeaux (Gironde). When Cyclone Chido struck, mid-December, tearing off the neighbor’s roof and flooding the family fair, she decided, with her parents, to buy her terminal in mainland France.

The disaster has only accelerated a choice that many families were already considering. The Mahorais education system has been suffering for several years: lack of classes, canceled courses, violence around establishments … Chido has worsened the situation. In many high schools, almost one in two lessons is no longer guaranteed. “The state of the school is catastrophic, the students are disoriented,” laments Ahamada Riffain, a truck driver, who also sent his college girl to metropolitan France. “We pay the same taxes, but our children do not have access to the same instruction …”

In the Senate, the start of the examination of the bill “Réfonder Mayotte”

This Monday, May 19, the Senate began examining the Refoundation Act of Mayotte. The text provides for the construction of new schools and colleges by 2031 to stem the overload of establishments. But many did not have the strength to wait. In fifteen days, the Aïda family had brought together its savings, reserved a plane ticket, found a high school willing to welcome it and warned the siblings already installed in Bordeaux.

In the aftermath of the disaster, Emmanuel Macron had promised the families concerned the possibility of educating their children elsewhere. “Many parents immediately called us,” says Chamssidine Assadi, president of the Union of Mahorais Associations in Gironde. The organization oriented them towards a system led by school mediators.

For the past twenty years, around sixty professionals, present in each department, have been facilitating the schooling of young Mahorais outside the archipelago. This is how thirty students were welcomed in the Gironde city, without imagining the academic difficulties they were going to encounter. In total, 1384 Mahorais students left the archipelago in the weeks that followed Chido.

Understanding teachers

Rather a good student in Mayotte, Aïda saw her average drop from 13 to 6.16/20. A slap. When her big sister, a student in linguistics, discovers her first results, she gets carried away: “But you don’t work or what?” ». However, the teenager revises late at night. “You feel zero, devalued,” she says.

In Mayotte, many classes are late on the programs. In the most in difficulty establishments, certain concepts addressed at the end of Col- Lège elsewhere are only seen in high school. “It is also the evaluation method that changes,” notes Aïda. There, many questionnaires. Here, rather text studies. “The teachers do everything to make me follow, but it’s hard to be the one that slows down the class. »»

On social networks, many students share their suffering linked to isolation, their school phobia or their depression. All fear not to obtain a bac than “they would have had in Mayotte”, in particular because of the re -evaluation of notes deemed less favorable in metropolitan France than on the archipelago.

A brutal uprooting

To this school anxiety is added culture shock. Upon her arrival, Aïda found her three sisters, including Roukaya, “her adored sister”. But the uprooting is nonetheless harsh. “Here, there is no nature, only concrete, barely a few trees,” she slips. Without her parents, she discovers that “adult life” is not really “the dream” that she imagined, she who must now pay a part of the rent, do the shopping, wash her laundry … “It’s hard to think of all this at my age. »»

Aïda does not want to give up her dreams

The gap is deep: “Without my language, my culture, my climate, I have a little trouble going to people: here, I have few friends,” she says. To keep a link with the friends she left, the teenager spends time on the Snapchat social network. In his class, two other students also left Mayotte after the cyclone. Direction La Réunion, a more affordable destination that convinced almost 650 young people.

Aïda, however, does not let go. Especially because she does not want to give up her dreams, “become a nurse or actress”. Besides, this summer, she will not return to Mayotte. She will stay in Bordeaux with a project in mind: to make “a real film. A fiction on Mahorais students who, from Chido, live far from theirs.