A number of 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 residence since 2012. The activity keeps the 84-year-old camp leader mentally and physically fit, and allows him to assess the welfare of other occupants.
His initial stay in Mauritania occurred in 1991, when he left Mali as Tuareg separatists fought with the army in his home Timbuktu province.
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 mathematics and physics teacher says he feels particularly sorry for the younger people of Mbera, which is located 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 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 dreams of returning to one day.”
Originally planned as a few thousand huts, Mbera now hosts around 120,000 refugees, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In addition, it is approximated that at least 154,000 refugees live in nearby villages across the Hodh Ech Chargui province. More than half are under 18.
Government authorities say the area is the third largest human encampment in Mauritania after Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the administrative and commercial capitals.
Each month, thousands more refugees arrive across the border, running from a militant uprising that took over the Tuareg rebellion and has since left swathes of the country lawless. Aid workers – notably at the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and Unicef office in the town of Bassikounou, which supports the camp and nearby settlements – cannot stop feeling anxious. They have faced shrinking resources as foreign donors – most notably the now discontinued USAID – have severely slashed funding this year.
“We’ve gone from [being able to] help almost 90,000 people with both provisions or financial assistance every month to about 53,000 … and had to discontinue essential nutrition programmes for malnourished children and mothers due to budget reductions,” says Aliou Diongue, country director for WFP.
The camp has many of the trappings of a permanent settlement, including its own bank, 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 signed up in school. New entrants are documented by aid workers and state agents using digital identification.
Nearby, security patrols guard the camp from the risk of armed groups 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 run an blaze control team putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network care for those injured by jihadist attacks and pregnant women while also promoting awareness about teaching girls.
But the camp’s requirements are clear.
“We have the will, we have the women, but not enough funding or equipment,” a leading member of the network says. “Sometimes we recycle 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 mostly unseasoned, save for a few pulses.
“We’re still providing school meals, basic food distributions, and monetary aid in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re concentrating on the most vulnerable while working relentlessly to secure new funding through the broadening of our support network.”
The meals are supported by recent gifts including several thousand tonnes of rice provided by the South Korean government – the only products in a bulk of the warehouses. A few donors are also helping start self-sufficiency programmes to help refugees farm and raise animals so they can earn an income and boost their livelihood.
Though Malha oversees everything responsibly, helping the aid workers’ assist the most disadvantaged 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 rely solely on humanitarian aid. Sometimes that aid is enough, 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 pride.”
