🔗 Share this article

Several mornings a week, Mohamed ‘Momo’ Ag Malha journeys at least 7 miles (11km) around the sprawling Mbera refugee camp in south-eastern Mauritania that has been his dwelling since 2012. The activity keeps the 84-year-old camp elder vigorous, and allows him to check on the wellbeing of other residents.

His initial stay in Mauritania came in 1991, when he escaped Mali as Tuareg separatists battled 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 unrest once again forced him across the border.

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

“Some of the young ones who were born here in Mbera have not laid eyes on Mali,” he says. “They do not know their homeland [and] that is heartbreaking because a refugee always has split affections: one here, where he lives, and another over there, in his homeland, which he longs to revisit one day.”

Initially conceived as a few thousand shelters, Mbera now hosts around 120,000 refugees, according to UNHCR. In also, it is estimated 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 third largest human community in Mauritania after Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the governmental and business hubs.

Each month, thousands more refugees come across the border, fleeing a extremist rebellion that took over the Tuareg rebellion and has since left large parts of the country lawless. Aid workers – especially at the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and Unicef office in the town of Bassikounou, which supports the camp and adjacent settlements – cannot stop feeling anxious. They have faced shrinking resources as foreign donors – most notably the now ceased USAID – have drastically cut funding this year.

“We’ve gone from [being able to] assist almost 90,000 people with both food or cash every month to about 53,000 … and had to halt essential nutrition programmes for undernourished children and mothers due to budget reductions,” says Aliou Diongue, country director for WFP.

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

Nearby, gendarmerie patrols protect the camp from the risk of militants just a few miles from the border.

Some residents have taken on new duties with zeal: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation farm produce for sale and operate an firefighting unit putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network look after those wounded by jihadist attacks and mothers-to-be while also raising awareness about schooling girls.

But the camp’s demands are obvious.

“We have the will, we have the women, but not enough resources 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 served one meal daily by WFP. At one school with 100 children per class, six or seven of them cluster by a big tray to eat the same meal every school day – rice that is largely basic, save for a few beans.

“We’re still providing school meals, essential food aid, and financial support in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re focusing on the most vulnerable while working relentlessly to obtain new funding through the broadening of our donor base.”

The meals are supported by recent contributions including several thousand tonnes of rice supplied by the South Korean government – the only goods in a bulk of the warehouses. A few donors are also helping launch self-sufficiency programmes to help refugees grow crops and keep animals so they can generate funds and boost their standard of living.

Though Malha supervises everything dutifully, helping the aid workers’ assist the most vulnerable households, his heart aches to return to Mali.

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

“We are grateful to 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.”