🔗 Share this article

Several mornings a week, Mohamed ‘Momo’ Ag Malha treks at least 7 miles (11km) around the sprawling Mbera refugee camp in south-eastern Mauritania that has been his home since 2012. The routine keeps the 84-year-old camp leader healthy in mind and body, and enables him to check on the welfare of other residents.

His first stay in Mauritania happened in 1991, when he fled Mali as Tuareg insurgents battled with the army in his native Timbuktu province.

After four years as a refugee, he came 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 mathematics and physics teacher says he feels deeply sympathetic 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 longs to revisit one day.”

First established as a few thousand dwellings, Mbera now accommodates around 120,000 refugees, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In addition, it is approximated that at least 154,000 refugees dwell in nearby villages across the Hodh Ech Chargui area. More than half are under 18.

Government officials say the area is the number three human settlement in Mauritania after Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the administrative and commercial hubs.

Each month, thousands more refugees come across the border, running from a jihadist insurgency that took over the Tuareg rebellion and has since left large parts of the country uncontrollable. Aid workers – notably 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 dwindling resources as foreign donors – most notably the now discontinued USAID – have drastically cut 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 discontinue 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 characteristics of a established settlement, including its own financial institution, eight schools, a market with more than 500 shops, and volleyball and football programmes. Members of a parent-teacher association use megaphones to get more children enrolled in school. New entrants are processed by aid workers and state agents using biometric systems.

Nearby, gendarmerie patrols secure the camp from the threat of fighters just a few miles from the border.

Some residents have adopted new duties with gusto: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation cultivate food for sale and operate an blaze control team putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network care for those wounded by jihadist attacks and expectant mothers while also spreading awareness about educating girls.

But the camp’s requirements are obvious.

“We have the desire, we have the women, but not enough financial support or equipment,” 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 provided 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 almost plain, save for a few beans.

“We’re still supplying 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 relentlessly to acquire new funding through the expansion of our support network.”

The meals are powered by recent gifts including several thousand tonnes of rice supplied by the South Korean government – the only items in a most of the warehouses. A few donors are also helping initiate entrepreneurship programmes to help refugees cultivate and keep animals so they can make money and boost their quality of life.

Though Malha supervises everything dutifully, helping the aid workers’ support the most needy households, his heart yearns to return to Mali.

“When you leave your country, you lose 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 suffer.

“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 self-respect.”