A number of 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 residence since 2012. The exercise keeps the 84-year-old camp leader healthy in mind and body, and allows him to assess the wellbeing of other occupants.
His initial stay in Mauritania came in 1991, when he left Mali as Tuareg separatists fought with the army in his home Timbuktu region.
After four years as a refugee, he came back and worked for a year as a community worker before transitioning to a teacher. Then in 2012, the Tuareg conflict once again pushed him across the border.
The former math and science teacher says he feels deeply sympathetic for the young inhabitants of Mbera, which is situated 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 hopes to go back to one day.”
First established as a few thousand dwellings, Mbera now hosts around 120,000 refugees, according to the UN refugee agency. In also, it is calculated that at least 154,000 refugees live in nearby villages across the Hodh Ech Chargui province. 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 capitals.
Each month, thousands more refugees arrive across the border, fleeing a extremist rebellion that took over the Tuareg rebellion and has since left swathes 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 being concerned. They have faced declining resources as foreign donors – most notably the now defunct USAID – have drastically cut funding this year.
“We’ve gone from [being able to] support almost 90,000 people with both nutritional aid or money every month to about 53,000 … and had to halt essential nutrition programmes for hungry children and mothers due to funding cuts,” says Aliou Diongue, country director for WFP.
The camp has many of the features of a long-term settlement, including its own bank, eight schools, a market with more than 500 outlets, and volleyball and football activities. Members of a parent-teacher association use loudspeakers to get more children registered in school. New arrivals are processed by aid workers and state agents using digital identification.
Nearby, security patrols guard the camp from the threat of fighters just a few miles from the border.
Some residents have adopted new responsibilities with gusto: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation farm produce for sale and operate an blaze control team putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network care for those maimed by jihadist attacks and mothers-to-be while also raising awareness about teaching girls.
But the camp’s requirements are evident.
“We have the desire, we have the women, but not enough financial support or supplies,” a leading member of the network says. “Sometimes we reuse what little we have, but it is not enough for the demands 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 sit 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, staple provisions, and financial support in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re prioritizing the most at-risk while working continuously to secure new funding through the expansion of our donor base.”
The meals are supported by recent donations including several thousand tonnes of rice supplied by the South Korean government – the only items in a bulk of the warehouses. A few donors are also helping launch entrepreneurship programmes to help refugees grow crops and rear animals so they can generate funds and enhance their quality of life.
Though Malha oversees everything conscientiously, helping the aid workers’ cater to the most vulnerable households, his heart yearns 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 struggle.
“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.”
