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

Many mornings a week, Mohamed ‘Momo’ Ag Malha journeys at least 7 miles (11km) around the sprawling Mbera refugee camp in southeastern Mauritania that has been his home since 2012. The routine keeps the 84-year-old camp coordinator mentally and physically fit, and enables him to assess the welfare of other inhabitants.

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

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

The former mathematics and physics teacher says he feels especially sad for the younger people of Mbera, which is positioned 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 painful 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.”

Originally planned as a few thousand shelters, Mbera now accommodates around 120,000 refugees, according to UNHCR. In furthermore, it is approximated that at least 154,000 refugees reside in nearby villages across the Hodh Ech Chargui region. More than half are under 18.

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

Each month, thousands more refugees arrive across the border, escaping a extremist rebellion that co-opted 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 services the camp and nearby settlements – cannot stop being concerned. They have faced shrinking 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 nutritional aid or money every month to about 53,000 … and had to discontinue essential 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 long-term 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 megaphones to get more children signed up in school. New comers are registered by aid workers and state agents using biometric systems.

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

Some residents have assumed new responsibilities with enthusiasm: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation grow crops for sale and run an blaze control team 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 educating girls.

But the camp’s demands are obvious.

“We have the determination, 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 sit 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 supplying school meals, staple provisions, and financial support in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re prioritizing the most vulnerable while working continuously to obtain new funding through the expansion of our funding sources.”

The meals are powered by recent contributions including several thousand tonnes of rice provided by the South Korean government – the only goods in a majority of the warehouses. A few donors are also helping initiate entrepreneurship programmes to help refugees grow crops and rear animals so they can generate funds and improve their standard of living.

Though Malha supervises everything conscientiously, helping the aid workers’ cater to the most disadvantaged 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 adequate, 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.”