🔗 Share this article

Many mornings a week, Mohamed ‘Momo’ Ag Malha treks at least 7 miles (11km) around the enormous Mbera refugee camp in southeastern Mauritania that has been his residence since 2012. The exercise keeps the 84-year-old camp leader mentally and physically fit, and allows him to check on the wellbeing of other occupants.

His initial stay in Mauritania occurred in 1991, when he left Mali as Tuareg separatists fought with the army in his native Timbuktu province.

After four years as a refugee, he returned home and worked for a year as a community worker before becoming a teacher. Then in 2012, the Tuareg conflict once again forced him across the border.

The former math and science teacher says he feels particularly sorry for the younger people of Mbera, which is situated approximately 30 miles from the Malian border.

“Some of the kids who were born here in Mbera have never even seen Mali,” he says. “They do not know their homeland [and] that is heartbreaking because a refugee always has two hearts: one here, where he lives, and another over there, in his homeland, which he hopes to go back to one day.”

First established as a few thousand dwellings, Mbera now hosts around 120,000 refugees, according to UNHCR. In also, it is calculated that at least 154,000 refugees reside in nearby villages across the Hodh Ech Chargui area. More than half are under 18.

Government representatives say the area is the number three human community in Mauritania after Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the administrative and commercial centers.

Each month, thousands more refugees pour in across the border, escaping a extremist rebellion that co-opted the Tuareg rebellion and has since left swathes of the country uncontrollable. Aid workers – especially at the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and Unicef office in the town of Bassikounou, which supports the camp and neighbouring settlements – cannot stop feeling anxious. They have faced shrinking resources as foreign donors – most notably the now defunct USAID – have severely slashed funding this year.

“We’ve gone from [being able to] help almost 90,000 people with both provisions or financial assistance every month to about 53,000 … and had to discontinue crucial nutrition programmes for hungry children and mothers due to budget reductions,” says Aliou Diongue, country director for WFP.

The camp has many of the characteristics of a long-term settlement, including its own bank, eight schools, a market with more than 500 shops, and volleyball and football programmes. Members of a parent-teacher association use amplifiers to get more children enrolled in school. New arrivals are processed by aid workers and state agents using biometric systems.

Nearby, police patrols secure the camp from the threat of militants just a few miles from the border.

Some residents have taken on new roles with gusto: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation grow crops for sale and run an blaze control team putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network support those injured by jihadist attacks and mothers-to-be while also spreading awareness about teaching girls.

But the camp’s requirements are evident.

“We have the determination, we have the women, but not enough financial support or materials,” a leading member of the network says. “Sometimes we reuse what little we have, but it is not enough for the needs of the camp.”

In the schools, the children are given one meal daily by WFP. At one school with 100 children per class, six or seven of them sit by a big tray to eat the same meal every school day – rice that is mostly unseasoned, save for a few legumes.

“We’re still supplying school meals, basic food distributions, and financial support in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re focusing on the most at-risk while working tirelessly to obtain new funding through the broadening of our funding sources.”

The meals are powered by recent gifts including several thousand tonnes of rice donated by the South Korean government – the only items in a most of the warehouses. A few donors are also helping start business programmes to help refugees cultivate and keep animals so they can earn an income and boost their livelihood.

Though Malha oversees everything dutifully, helping the aid workers’ support the most disadvantaged households, his heart aches to return to Mali.

“When you leave your country, you forfeit everything – your work, your home, your family sometimes,” he says. “Here, you are entirely reliant on humanitarian aid. Sometimes that aid is adequate, sometimes it is not. And when it is not, you suffer.

“We appreciate the Mauritanian authorities and the humanitarian organisations for what they have done for us but it is not the same as being in your own country, working with your own hands and living with dignity.”