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Even before the Jan. 12 earthquake, only about half of Haiti’s school-age children were enrolled in classes, a glaring symbol of the nation’s poverty.

more than 3,000 school buildings in the earthquake zone had been destroyed or damaged. Hundreds of teachers and thousands of students were killed, and officials are questioning the safety of the remaining buildings after violent aftershocks in recent weeks, making the goal of Haitian education officials to reopen many schools by April 1 seem increasingly remote.

Children staying in the camps face trials beyond laboring in the streets. Health workers in the camps are reporting a rising number of young rape victims, including girls as young as 12. Alison Thompson, an Australian nurse and documentary director who volunteers at a tent clinic on the grounds of the Pétionville Club, said she had cared for a 14-year-old girl who was raped recently in the camp. “The entire structure of the lives of these children has been upended, and now they’re dealing with the predators living next to them,” Ms. Thompson said.

It’s been almost a year since the quake brought Christine and her mother, brother and sister to this muddy sprawl of tents by a garbage-choked canal, where planes roar overhead and cars and trucks zoom close by.

 Her memories of Jan. 12, 2010 are vivid and sad. “We were standing in the middle of the street: myself, my mum and my younger sister,” she said. “We were holding each other. We were in a circle, screaming: ‘Jesus, save us, save us.’

Asked at the start of their first Chinese class what motivated them to take up the language, the students of the Institut de la Providence, a secondary school outside Namur in Belgium, give their new teacher varied answers. “It’s a big country,” says one. “I’ve been to China and would like to go back,” ventures another. The two dozen teenagers are part of a pilot project started this autumn in nine Belgian schools to promote Chinese language learning. More broadly, they are among hundreds of thousands of students in the West who are opting to learn Mandarin Chinese, often at the expense of traditional languages such as Spanish or German.

China’s rapid economic rise is gradually translating into a greater presence in European and U.S. classrooms, from a very small base as recently as 10 or 15 years ago.

From a marginal position 15 years ago, Chinese has imposed itself as the fourth major language behind French, Spanish and German, which, on current trends, it will overtake by the end of the decade.