Many times a week, Mohamed ‘Momo’ Ag Malha walks at least 7 miles (11km) around the enormous Mbera refugee camp in southeastern Mauritania that has been his home since 2012. The routine keeps the 84-year-old camp elder vigorous, and permits him to check on the wellbeing of other occupants.
His initial stay in Mauritania occurred in 1991, when he left Mali as Tuareg insurgents fought with the army in his native Timbuktu area.
After four years as a refugee, he came back and worked for a year as a social worker before becoming a teacher. Then in 2012, the Tuareg fighting once again pushed him across the border.
The former mathematics and physics teacher says he feels especially sad for the young 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 heartbreaking because a refugee always has dual loyalties: one here, where he lives, and another over there, in his homeland, which he longs to revisit one day.”
Originally planned as a few thousand huts, Mbera now accommodates around 120,000 refugees, according to the UN refugee agency. In addition, it is calculated that at least 154,000 refugees reside in nearby villages across the Hodh Ech Chargui region. 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 centers.
Each month, thousands more refugees arrive across the border, fleeing a extremist rebellion that took over the Tuareg rebellion and has since left extensive areas of the country ungovernable. 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 dwindling resources as foreign donors – most notably the now ceased USAID – have drastically cut funding this year.
“We’ve gone from [being able to] help almost 90,000 people with both nutritional aid or money every month to about 53,000 … and had to stop 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 financial institution, eight schools, a market with more than 500 stores, and volleyball and football initiatives. Members of a parent-teacher association use megaphones to get more children registered in school. New comers are processed by aid workers and state agents using digital identification.
Nearby, security patrols secure the camp from the danger of armed groups just a few miles from the border.
Some residents have assumed new roles with zeal: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation grow crops for sale and manage an blaze control team putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network look after those injured by jihadist attacks and pregnant women while also promoting awareness about schooling girls.
But the camp’s demands are clear.
“We have the desire, we have the women, but not enough funding or supplies,” a leading member of the network says. “Sometimes we repurpose what little we have, but it is not enough for the demands 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 sit by a big tray to eat the same meal every school day – rice that is largely basic, save for a few legumes.
“We’re still providing school meals, essential food aid, and cash assistance in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re focusing on the most at-risk while working tirelessly to acquire new funding through the broadening of our donor base.”
The meals are supported by recent donations including several thousand tonnes of rice donated by the South Korean government – the only goods in a bulk of the warehouses. A few donors are also helping initiate business programmes to help refugees cultivate and raise animals so they can make money and enhance their quality of life.
Though Malha manages everything dutifully, helping the aid workers’ assist the most needy households, his heart longs to return to Mali.
“When you leave your country, you lose everything – your work, your home, your family sometimes,” he says. “Here, you are entirely reliant 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 pride.”
