“The hardest thing is when people ask me where I’m from,” Najla Mohamedlamin Salma, 27, tells me. “It’s such a long story.”

With her rich North African accent and colorful hijab, Najla cuts an anomalous figure on the streets of suburban Bellingham, Washington. She is a new arrival to this quiet, mostly white city, yet the effusive young woman is accustomed to life as an outsider. Najla came of age in exile alongside 165,000 fellow Saharawi refugees clinging defiantly to life in the brutal Sahara Desert. Growing up in a desolate corner of southern Algeria, Najla was raised on elders’ stories of their lost homeland, the Western Sahara, a resource-rich swath of land under Moroccan control since 1976. Widely considered “the last colony in Africa,” the Western Sahara has been categorized as a “non-self-governing territory” by the United Nations since 1963, listed alongside Guam and the Falkland Islands as remnants of European imperialism.

Najla is in many ways the embodiment of the Saharawi ethos—vigorous and spirited, yet profoundly patient. For years, Najla’s efforts to study abroad ended in frustration and her inevitable return to the desert. But she insists she never lost hope. “There was no future for me in the desert,” Najla says, “but I felt, if I could find my way out, I could really be something.”

Today, the isolated tent-cities are an accretion of four decades of deferred hope.

Najla is not the only Saharawi disillusioned by the camps. Yet for years, the limitations of camp life have been pushed off as temporary trials, sure to evaporate with the advent of a political solution. Originally, the thousands of refugees who fled the Western Sahara in 1976 hoped their sojourn in Algeria would last a few weeks. Today, the isolated tent-cities are an accretion of four decades of deferred hope.

Najla’s parents were born in the Western Sahara under Spanish colonial rule, and were raised in the tumult that accompanied the decolonization of Africa. They were still young when Spain withdrew from the region in 1976, after prolonged pressure from the international community and the Saharawi resistance front, the Polisario. Fast on the heels of the Spaniards, Moroccan and Mauritanian armies descended on the Western Sahara to unilaterally annex the territory, defying U.N. calls for Saharawi self-determination. The Polisario responded to the Moroccan-Mauritanian advances by declaring the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) on February 27, 1976. “We are determined to continue the struggle until final victory, whatever the sacrifices may be,” declared the SADR’s founding document. “Until our people have completed the liberation of their national territory, there will be neither peace nor stability in this region.”