Mayotte is a strange place to live in. On one hand, the country is a French department and has belonged to France for over a hundred years. You can find La Poste and the Conseil Général, every village has a Mairie (town hall) and often a boulangerie (baker's)....

Talk about keeping things for a rainy day. There are so many rainy days here – and so much rain – that I don’t know what to do with most of them. Some do, though. There’s construction work outside at the moment – just underneath our flat, actually – where...