Everyday Reality for one hundred twenty thousand Refugees in Mauritania's Massive Mbera Camp on the Malians Border.

Several days a week, Mohamed ‘Momo’ Ag Malha walks at least 7 miles (11km) around the sprawling Mbera refugee camp in southeastern Mauritania that has been his home since 2012. The activity keeps the 84-year-old camp elder healthy in mind and body, and allows him to check on the condition of other residents.

His first stay in Mauritania happened in 1991, when he escaped Mali as Tuareg rebels battled with the army in his home Timbuktu province.

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

The former mathematics and physics teacher says he feels particularly sorry for the young inhabitants of Mbera, which is positioned approximately 30 miles from the Malian border.

“Some of the young ones who were born here in Mbera have never even seen Mali,” he says. “They do not know their nation [and] that is painful because a refugee always has two hearts: 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 hosts around 120,000 refugees, according to the UN refugee agency. In also, it is approximated that at least 154,000 refugees live in nearby villages across the Hodh Ech Chargui area. More than half are under 18.

Government authorities say the area is the number three human settlement in Mauritania after Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the administrative and commercial capitals.

Each month, thousands more refugees arrive across the border, fleeing a militant uprising that took over the Tuareg rebellion and has since left large parts of the country uncontrollable. Aid workers – especially at the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and Unicef office in the town of Bassikounou, which assists the camp and nearby settlements – cannot stop being concerned. They have faced declining resources as foreign donors – most notably the now discontinued USAID – have drastically cut funding this year.

“We’ve gone from [being able to] help almost 90,000 people with both provisions or financial assistance every month to about 53,000 … and had to stop 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 features of a established settlement, including its own financial institution, eight schools, a market with more than 500 shops, and volleyball and football initiatives. Members of a parent-teacher association use megaphones to get more children enrolled in school. New arrivals are documented by aid workers and state agents using biometric systems.

Nearby, security patrols secure the camp from the threat of armed groups just a few miles from the border.

Some residents have taken on new roles with enthusiasm: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation cultivate food for sale and run an blaze control team putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network care for those wounded by jihadist attacks and pregnant women while also promoting awareness about educating girls.

But the camp’s requirements are evident.

“We have the determination, we have the women, but not enough funding or supplies,” 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 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 beans.

“We’re still offering school meals, staple provisions, and monetary aid in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re focusing on the most at-risk while working relentlessly to acquire new funding through the diversification 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 items in a majority of the warehouses. A few donors are also helping launch self-sufficiency programmes to help refugees grow crops and rear animals so they can make money and boost their livelihood.

Though Malha supervises everything conscientiously, helping the aid workers’ cater to 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 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 self-respect.”