There was something about Mamadou. I met a lot of lovely children while reporting on street kids trafficked from rural West Africa into begging networks in Dakar. It's the sort of story that requires a correspondent to have her journalistic calluses firmly in place when she sets out in the morning. I saw kids getting whacked on the head with a thick braided rope by their teacher when they made a mistake in their Koranic memorization, I saw kids nearly get run over by indifferent rich Senegalese irritated by the begging bowls at the window of their SUVs, I saw kids huddled on the concrete floor of a dorm room under a filthy blanket, shivering in the midday heat from what was likely malaria. All of it was infuriating.

On the day I met Mamadou, I had set out to interview kids begging in the street – hoping that, when I saw them away from the hovering presence of their teachers/controllers, I'd hear a more honest version of their lives in the daara, the religious schools. I went with Seydou Nourou Mbodji, who recently published a moving book called A mes frères des rues, told in the first person voice of one of the street boys. He was going to translate from Wolof to French for me.

The first kid we met, outside a posh bakery, was so sick that we abandoned work for an hour to take him to a dispensary. We couldn't pay for many drugs, though, because Seydou was afraid the child would either take them all at once, seeking the comfort of a high (of sorts), or else be beaten up for them.

Next we walked down to a gas station and there we found Mamadou, scruffy and forlorn. Seydou began to chat to him in Wolof, at which point Mamadou apologized in beautiful French and explained he hadn't been in Senegal long enough to learn the local language. He happily put aside his begging bowl to talk to us; he insisted on getting us a piece of old cardboard box to sit on in his patch of parking lot; he sternly told other children who swarmed around not to bother us. His story came pouring out – how he'd tried to make it into regular high school, couldn't afford the books to study and failed the entrance exams, came to Dakar hoping a religious school would offer him at least some sort of alternative. What he really wanted, he informed me wistfully, was to be a journalist – I might have suspected I was being conned, but he told me all about a career fair at his old school, and how he'd weighed up many options before picking journalism, which he thought would be important in a corrupt and mis-run place like his home country, Guinea-Conakry. And he was full of intelligent questions about the trade.

After an hour or so with him, Seydou and I should have moved on, but we were both enthralled by this kid. Seydou excused himself to make a phone call – and he came back, after a long conversation on his cellphone, to hand Mamadou a piece of paper with an address. He had called a woman he knows from his work with street kids, Anta Mbow, who runs a shelter in Dakar, Empire Des Enfants. There she teaches the kids life and job skills and sometimes helps send them home to their families. He had put aside his usual professional objectivity to plead with Ms. Mbow to squeeze in this one particular kid. He primed Mamadou on how to get to the shelter, told him he could learn to be a journalist, or go back home to his family if he wanted. Mamadou was wary but clearly thrilled; he was worried, though, if he showed up there as dirty as he was, they would turn him away. Seydou reassured him; I gave him the equivalent of 25 cents for soap.

Seydou and I left feeling just a little bit hopeful, although as we walked away, a tiny, filthy 7-year-old pulled on my shirt, saying, "Please, I'd like to go home too." I turned to Seydou, agonized, and he gently led me on, reminding me that the problem is huge, and reporting on it was really the only way I had to try to address it. A couple of days later, before I left Senegal, Seydou and I checked in with Ms. Mbow: Mamadou had shown up (clean) for his first meeting, and he was enrolled in their program. Somehow, seeing Mamadou off the street helped lessen the sting when I thought of all those other children.

 But then, a couple of weeks later, I asked Seydou to check in on Mamadou again – and when he got back to me, I was reminded that it's never this easy. Mamadou moved to l'Empire, but he had a difficult time adjusting. He fought all the time with other kids. So Ms. Mbow tracked down a way to reach his parents, and his mother said she wanted him to come home (like so many other parents, she had had no idea that her son had wound up a street beggar rather than a religious pupil.) Ms. Mbow made the arrangements – but when the time came, Mamadou balked: he wouldn't go. Seydou says he was too embarrassed to return home to the village, implicitly acknowledging that he failed in his big chance at city life. He told Ms. Mbow he was going back to the street instead.

Today, Seydou told me he his working on getting Mamadou into another shelter – but first he has to find him. He's been looking at the bank machines and intersections of upmarket Dakar, the places a kid like Mamadou goes to beg for enough to survive.