Daily Existence for 120,000 Asylum Seekers in Mauritania's Vast Mbera Camp on the Malians Border.

Several times 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 activity keeps the 84-year-old camp coordinator vigorous, and enables him to assess the welfare of other residents.

His initial stay in Mauritania came in 1991, when he fled Mali as Tuareg separatists battled with the army in his native Timbuktu region.

After four years as a refugee, he came back and worked for a year as a social worker before transitioning to a teacher. Then in 2012, the Tuareg conflict once again pushed him across the border.

The former mathematics and physics teacher says he feels deeply sympathetic for the younger residents of Mbera, which is located approximately 30 miles from the Malian border.

“Some of the children who were born here in Mbera have never even seen Mali,” he says. “They do not know their homeland [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.”

Initially conceived as a few thousand shelters, Mbera now hosts around 120,000 refugees, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In addition, it is estimated that at least 154,000 refugees dwell in nearby villages across the Hodh Ech Chargui region. More than half are under 18.

Government representatives say the area is the third largest human community in Mauritania after Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the administrative and commercial hubs.

Each month, thousands more refugees come across the border, running from a extremist rebellion that took over the Tuareg rebellion and has since left swathes of the country lawless. Aid workers – particularly at the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and Unicef office in the town of Bassikounou, which assists the camp and adjacent settlements – cannot stop feeling anxious. They have faced dwindling resources as foreign donors – most notably the now defunct USAID – have sharply reduced funding this year.

“We’ve gone from [being able to] support almost 90,000 people with both nutritional aid or money every month to about 53,000 … and had to stop crucial nutrition programmes for undernourished children and mothers due to funding cuts,” 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 stores, and volleyball and football initiatives. Members of a parent-teacher association use megaphones to get more children registered in school. New entrants are registered by aid workers and state agents using fingerprint technology.

Nearby, gendarmerie patrols protect the camp from the danger of fighters just a few miles from the border.

Some residents have assumed new responsibilities with gusto: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation grow crops for sale and manage an anti-fire brigade putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network care for those injured by jihadist attacks and expectant mothers while also raising awareness about teaching girls.

But the camp’s needs are evident.

“We have the will, we have the women, but not enough financial support or materials,” a leading member of the network says. “Sometimes we reuse what little we have, but it is not enough for the needs 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 legumes.

“We’re still providing school meals, staple provisions, and cash assistance in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re concentrating on the most vulnerable while working tirelessly to acquire new funding through the broadening of our funding sources.”

The meals are funded by recent contributions including several thousand tonnes of rice donated by the South Korean government – the only products in a bulk of the warehouses. A few donors are also helping launch business programmes to help refugees grow crops and rear animals so they can earn an income and boost their standard of living.

Though Malha supervises everything responsibly, helping the aid workers’ cater to 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 are entirely reliant on humanitarian aid. Sometimes that aid is sufficient, sometimes it is not. And when it is not, you struggle.

“We appreciate 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.”