Many mornings a week, Mohamed ‘Momo’ Ag Malha journeys at least 7 miles (11km) around the vast Mbera refugee camp in southeastern Mauritania that has been his home since 2012. The routine keeps the 84-year-old camp leader mentally and physically fit, and permits him to monitor the wellbeing of other inhabitants.
His first stay in Mauritania occurred in 1991, when he left Mali as Tuareg separatists battled with the army in his native Timbuktu region.
After four years as a refugee, he returned home and worked for a year as a community worker before becoming a teacher. Then in 2012, the Tuareg fighting once again compelled him across the border.
The former mathematics and physics teacher says he feels particularly sorry for the young people of Mbera, which is positioned approximately 30 miles from the Malian border.
“Some of the children who were born here in Mbera have not laid eyes on Mali,” he says. “They do not know their nation [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.”
First established as a few thousand shelters, Mbera now hosts around 120,000 refugees, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In furthermore, it is calculated that at least 154,000 refugees reside in nearby villages across the Hodh Ech Chargui area. More than half are under 18.
Government officials say the area is the third largest human settlement in Mauritania after Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the governmental and business capitals.
Each month, thousands more refugees pour in 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 assists the camp and adjacent settlements – cannot stop worrying. They have faced declining resources as foreign donors – most notably the now ceased USAID – have severely slashed funding this year.
“We’ve gone from [being able to] support almost 90,000 people with both food or cash 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 outlets, and volleyball and football initiatives. Members of a parent-teacher association use megaphones to get more children enrolled in school. New comers are processed by aid workers and state agents using fingerprint technology.
Nearby, gendarmerie patrols protect the camp from the risk of militants just a few miles from the border.
Some residents have assumed 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 look after those maimed by jihadist attacks and mothers-to-be while also raising awareness about teaching girls.
But the camp’s needs are clear.
“We have the will, we have the women, but not enough resources or equipment,” a leading member of the network says. “Sometimes we reuse what little we have, but it is not enough for the requirements 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 pulses.
“We’re still supplying school meals, staple provisions, and monetary aid in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re focusing on the most needy while working tirelessly to secure new funding through the broadening of our donor base.”
The meals are powered by recent donations including several thousand tonnes of rice provided by the South Korean government – the only products in a majority of the warehouses. A few donors are also helping start entrepreneurship programmes to help refugees cultivate and keep animals so they can make money and improve their quality of life.
Though Malha supervises everything responsibly, helping the aid workers’ support the most needy households, his heart aches 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 sufficient, 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 self-respect.”
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