Several days 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 home since 2012. The exercise keeps the 84-year-old camp leader mentally and physically fit, and allows him to monitor the condition of other occupants.
His initial stay in Mauritania happened in 1991, when he fled Mali as Tuareg rebels fought with the army in his home 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 unrest once again pushed him across the border.
The former mathematics and physics teacher says he feels deeply sympathetic for the young people of Mbera, which is positioned 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 heartbreaking because a refugee always has split affections: one here, where he lives, and another over there, in his homeland, which he longs to revisit one day.”
Initially conceived as a few thousand dwellings, Mbera now accommodates around 120,000 refugees, according to the UN refugee agency. In furthermore, it is calculated that at least 154,000 refugees dwell in nearby villages across the Hodh Ech Chargui area. 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 hubs.
Each month, thousands more refugees come across the border, escaping a jihadist insurgency that hijacked the Tuareg rebellion and has since left extensive areas of the country ungovernable. Aid workers – particularly at the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and Unicef office in the town of Bassikounou, which assists the camp and nearby settlements – cannot stop feeling anxious. They have faced dwindling resources as foreign donors – most notably the now defunct USAID – have severely slashed funding this year.
“We’ve gone from [being able to] assist almost 90,000 people with both nutritional aid or money every month to about 53,000 … and had to halt crucial nutrition programmes for hungry 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 activities. Members of a parent-teacher association use amplifiers to get more children signed up in school. New comers are registered by aid workers and state agents using biometric systems.
Nearby, security patrols secure the camp from the risk of militants just a few miles from the border.
Some residents have adopted new duties with enthusiasm: 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 look after those wounded by jihadist attacks and expectant mothers while also spreading awareness about schooling girls.
But the camp’s needs are obvious.
“We have the desire, we have the women, but not enough resources or supplies,” a leading member of the network says. “Sometimes we recycle what little we have, but it is not enough for the needs 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 mostly unseasoned, save for a few pulses.
“We’re still providing school meals, basic food distributions, 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 acquire new funding through the broadening of our support network.”
The meals are powered by recent contributions including several thousand tonnes of rice provided by the South Korean government – the only goods in a most of the warehouses. A few donors are also helping initiate self-sufficiency programmes to help refugees grow crops and rear animals so they can generate funds and enhance their livelihood.
Though Malha supervises everything responsibly, helping the aid workers’ assist the most needy 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 adequate, 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.”
