Several mornings a week, Mohamed ‘Momo’ Ag Malha walks at least 7 miles (11km) around the sprawling Mbera refugee camp in south-eastern Mauritania that has been his dwelling since 2012. The exercise keeps the 84-year-old camp elder healthy in mind and body, and permits him to monitor the condition of other occupants.
His first stay in Mauritania happened in 1991, when he fled Mali as Tuareg insurgents clashed with the army in his home Timbuktu area.
After four years as a refugee, he returned home 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 people of Mbera, which is located approximately 30 miles from the Malian border.
“Some of the kids who were born here in Mbera have not once visited Mali,” he says. “They do not know their country [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 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In furthermore, it is estimated that at least 154,000 refugees reside in nearby villages across the Hodh Ech Chargui area. More than half are under 18.
Government authorities say the area is the third-biggest human community in Mauritania after Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the governmental and business hubs.
Each month, thousands more refugees arrive across the border, running from a extremist rebellion that hijacked the Tuareg rebellion and has since left large parts of the country ungovernable. Aid workers – particularly at the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and Unicef office in the town of Bassikounou, which supports the camp and neighbouring settlements – cannot stop feeling anxious. They have faced declining resources as foreign donors – most notably the now discontinued USAID – have sharply reduced funding this year.
“We’ve gone from [being able to] help almost 90,000 people with both food or cash every month to about 53,000 … and had to discontinue 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 characteristics of a permanent settlement, including its own bank, eight schools, a market with more than 500 outlets, and volleyball and football programmes. Members of a parent-teacher association use loudspeakers to get more children signed up in school. New comers are processed by aid workers and state agents using biometric systems.
Nearby, gendarmerie patrols secure the camp from the danger of militants just a few miles from the border.
Some residents have adopted new roles with zeal: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation cultivate food for sale and operate an anti-fire brigade putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network support those injured by jihadist attacks and mothers-to-be while also promoting awareness about schooling girls.
But the camp’s demands are evident.
“We have the desire, 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 demands of the camp.”
In the schools, the children are given 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 offering 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 secure new funding through the diversification of our funding sources.”
The meals are funded by recent donations including several thousand tonnes of rice provided 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 cultivate and rear animals so they can earn an income and enhance their quality of life.
Though Malha oversees everything dutifully, helping the aid workers’ support the most vulnerable 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 enough, sometimes it is not. And when it is not, you struggle.
“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 dignity.”
