St Louis, Senegal  - Thioubalo rattles away at the door. Behind it come the sounds of running water and noisy children.

The 12-year-old shouts something, and you don't have to be fluent in Wolof - most common language in the West African state of Senegal - to realise that Thioubalo finally wants his turn under the shower at the Maison d'Ecoute in the heart of the old town of St Louis.

He needs to get cleaned up. His feet and his straggly arms are dust-caked, his worn-out clothes dirty.

The door opens and 12-year-old Thierno and seven-year-old Amadou emerge and jump down the steps past Thioubalo, who quickly nips into the shower. The two boys' clothes are hanging out to dry in the courtyard.

Amadou, Thierno and Thioubalo are regulars at the Maison d'Ecoute, where street children, young beggars and other youngsters in difficulty can find at least temporary refuge.

The walls of the inner courtyard are brightly painted, a big tapestry hangs on one of them, decorated with sewn-on silhouettes of children's hands.

Thierno shyly pulls away at the sleeve of Anna Sy, one of the centre's four permanent helpers. A scratch on his shoulder is bleeding. The young woman cleans it and applies a plaster.

"We have our little sick bay here," she says, and opens a book listing names and ailments.

Some of these - stomach ache and diarrhoea caused by unclean water, cuts to the foot of the mostly barefoot children, headlice - appear more regularly than others among the eight-to-15-year-olds.

Mostly, though, it is just as important for the children to have someone with a willing ear for their problems, big and small, for them to switch off from the stress of life on the street, and get back to being children again, if only for half an hour.

"Most of the boys who come to us are talibes," says Babacar Giop, head of the Maison d'Ecoute. Talibes are Koran students receiving instruction from, and living with, a Marabout religious teacher.

It is normal for children in predominantly Muslim Senegal to go to a Koran school, but standards vary enormously.

Very often, families of the home village of a teacher will send their children to his school, although he may long have left and be living in a town or city far away.

When parents have very little or no money for their children to stay at the schools, the boys have to help out by doing small jobs, or by begging in the streets.

St Louis, the old capital from French colonial times, attracts large numbers of tourists, and wherever these are out admiring the colonial architecture or the wooden masks in the many souvenir shops, they will encounter the ourstretched hands of the young talibes.

Thierno has not seen his parents or brothers and sisters since he arrived at the school two years ago. "I miss my little brother," he murmers.

"But the homesickness is a lot worse for the little ones at the school," he adds, pointing to Amadou, who is cosying up to Anna Sy, happy to get a little affection.

Babacar Giop knows the problems of the talibes out of his own experience. "I was a talibe myself," he says, "and I suffered a lot from not seeing my family for 12 years." (dpa)