🔗 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 dwelling since 2012. The routine keeps the 84-year-old camp coordinator healthy in mind and body, and enables him to check on the wellbeing of other residents.

His first stay in Mauritania happened in 1991, when he left Mali as Tuareg separatists battled with the army in his home Timbuktu province.

After four years as a refugee, he went back and worked for a year as a social worker before becoming a teacher. Then in 2012, the Tuareg conflict once again pushed 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 kids who were born here in Mbera have never even seen Mali,” he says. “They do not know their country [and] that is painful 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.”

Initially conceived as a few thousand shelters, Mbera now accommodates around 120,000 refugees, according to the UN refugee agency. In also, it is approximated that at least 154,000 refugees live in nearby villages across the Hodh Ech Chargui region. More than half are under 18.

Government officials say the area is the third-biggest human settlement in Mauritania after Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the governmental and business capitals.

Each month, thousands more refugees come across the border, running from a militant uprising that took over the Tuareg rebellion and has since left large parts of the country uncontrollable. Aid workers – particularly at the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and Unicef office in the town of Bassikounou, which supports the camp and adjacent settlements – cannot stop worrying. They have faced shrinking 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 halt vital nutrition programmes for undernourished children and mothers due to budget reductions,” says Aliou Diongue, country director for WFP.

The camp has many of the trappings of a long-term 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 signed up in school. New arrivals are registered by aid workers and state agents using digital identification.

Nearby, gendarmerie patrols guard the camp from the threat of armed groups just a few miles from the border.

Some residents have taken on new roles with zeal: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation cultivate food for sale and manage an anti-fire brigade putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network care for those wounded by jihadist attacks and mothers-to-be while also promoting awareness about educating girls.

But the camp’s requirements are evident.

“We have the will, we have the women, but not enough financial support or materials,” a leading member of the network says. “Sometimes we repurpose what little we have, but it is not enough for the requirements 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 providing school meals, basic food distributions, and cash assistance in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re concentrating on the most vulnerable while working tirelessly to secure new funding through the diversification of our support network.”

The meals are powered by recent contributions including several thousand tonnes of rice donated by the South Korean government – the only items in a majority of the warehouses. A few donors are also helping initiate business programmes to help refugees farm and rear animals so they can generate funds and boost their livelihood.

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

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

“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 self-respect.”