🔗 Share this article

Many mornings a week, Mohamed ‘Momo’ Ag Malha journeys at least 7 miles (11km) around the enormous Mbera refugee camp in south-eastern Mauritania that has been his home since 2012. The exercise keeps the 84-year-old camp leader mentally and physically fit, and enables him to assess the condition of other residents.

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

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

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

“Some of the children who were born here in Mbera have never even seen Mali,” he says. “They do not know their country [and] that is difficult 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 the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In addition, it is calculated that at least 154,000 refugees dwell in nearby villages across the Hodh Ech Chargui region. More than half are under 18.

Government representatives say the area is the third largest human community in Mauritania after Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the administrative and commercial capitals.

Each month, thousands more refugees arrive across the border, running from a extremist rebellion that hijacked the Tuareg rebellion and has since left extensive areas of the country lawless. Aid workers – particularly at the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and Unicef office in the town of Bassikounou, which assists the camp and nearby settlements – cannot stop being concerned. They have faced dwindling resources as foreign donors – most notably the now ceased USAID – have severely slashed funding this year.

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

The camp has many of the characteristics of a established settlement, including its own bank, eight schools, a market with more than 500 shops, and volleyball and football activities. Members of a parent-teacher association use megaphones to get more children registered in school. New entrants 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 adopted new responsibilities with zeal: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation grow crops for sale and operate an blaze control team putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network care for those injured by jihadist attacks and mothers-to-be while also promoting awareness about schooling girls.

But the camp’s demands are obvious.

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

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

“We’re still offering school meals, essential food aid, and monetary aid in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re focusing on the most vulnerable while working tirelessly to acquire new funding through the expansion of our funding sources.”

The meals are funded by recent donations including several thousand tonnes of rice supplied by the South Korean government – the only goods in a majority of the warehouses. A few donors are also helping initiate entrepreneurship programmes to help refugees grow crops and rear animals so they can earn an income and boost their standard of living.

Though Malha manages everything responsibly, helping the aid workers’ assist the most vulnerable households, his heart longs to return to Mali.

“When you leave your country, you sacrifice everything – your work, your home, your family sometimes,” he says. “Here, you rely solely on humanitarian aid. Sometimes that aid is adequate, sometimes it is not. And when it is not, you endure hardship.

“We thank 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.”