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"I used to find children having panic attacks at night," says Dr. Bertrand. "But since the classes started, I haven't seen kids nearly so distressed."

For Taïma, as for many children, the prospect of going back to school is exciting. "It'll be a great day for me, especially the math and French classes," she says, referring to her favourite subjects.

"When I get to school," she says, "I will also find out which of my friends are alive, and which ones are dead."

By participating in group activities, children can express themselves and channel their trauma through song, poetry and dance. With this in mind, AVSI has been training teachers to nurture displaced and vulnerable children. The training has produced significant changes in the philosophy and practice of education in Walikale.

“In the past, we would whip the children,” said Mr. Zirhumana Muzirhu. “But thanks to the psycho-social training, teachers and schoolchildren are now friends, so we don’t use the whip anymore.” The education-in-emergencies programme is also rehabilitating schools and providing school supplies and recreation kits, so that students can participate in regular activities that are crucial to their physical, mental, psychological and social development. In addition, the programme has provided more than 130,000 children with education kits in conflict-ravaged North Kivu Province in recent years.

“I like going to school and hope to finish it, but I’m not sure if another war will break out and make me displaced again,” she said. “My biggest fear is, I don’t know if my children will finish school one day,” admitted her mother.

In Tehran, Iran’s capital, Dr. Bilham has calculated that one million people could die in a predicted quake similar in intensity to the one in Haiti, which the Haitian government estimates killed 230,000. (Some Iranian geologists have pressed their government for decades to move the capital because of the nest of surrounding geologic faults.)

Ali Agaoglu, a Turkish developer ranked 468th last year on the Forbes list of billionaires, described how in the 1970s, salty sea sand and scrap iron were routinely used in buildings made of reinforced concrete. “At that time, this was the best material,” he said, according to a translation of the interview. “Not just us, but all companies were doing the same thing. If an earthquake occurs in Istanbul, not even the army will be able to get in.”

Istanbul stands out among threatened cities in developing countries because it is trying to get ahead of the risk. A first step was an earthquake master plan drawn up for the city and the federal government by Dr. Erdik’s team and researchers at three other Turkish universities in 2006. Such a plan is a rarity outside of rich cities like Tokyo and Los Angeles.Carrying out its long list of recommendations has proved more challenging, given that the biggest source of political pressure in Istanbul, as with most crowded cities, is not an impending earthquake but traffic, crime, jobs and other real-time troubles.Nonetheless, with the urgency amplified by the lessons from Haiti’s devastation, Istanbul is doing what it can to gird for its own disaster.

But a push is also coming from the bottom, as nonprofit groups, recognizing the limits of centralized planning, train dozens of teams of volunteers in poor districts and outfit them with radios, crowbars and first-aid kits so they can dig into the wreckage when their neighborhoods are shaken.

Under a program financed with more than $800 million in loans from the World Bank and the European Investment Bank, and more in the pipeline from other international sources, Turkey is in the early stages of bolstering hundreds of the most vulnerable schools in Istanbul, along with important public buildings and more than 50 hospitals. With about half of the nearly 700 schools assessed as high priorities retrofitted or replaced so far, progress is too slow to suit many Turkish engineers and geologists tracking the threat. But in districts where the work has been done or is under way — those closest to the Marmara Sea and the fault — students, parents and teachers express a sense of relief tempered by the knowledge that renovations only cut the odds of calamity.

“I hope it’s enough,” said Serkan Erdogan, an English teacher at the Bakirkoy Cumhuriyet primary school close to the Marmara coast, where $315,000 was spent to add reinforced walls, jackets of fresh concrete and steel rebar around old columns and to make adjustments as simple as changing classroom doors to open outward, easing evacuations. “The improvements are great, but the building may still collapse,” he said. “We have to learn how to live with that risk. The children need to know what they should do.”In a fifth-grade classroom, the student training that goes with the structural repairs was evident as Nazan Sati, a social worker, asked the 11-year-olds what they would do if an earthquake struck right at that moment. At first a forest of hands shot toward the ceiling. Ms. Sati quickly told them to show, not tell. In a mad, giggling scramble, the students dove beneath their desks. But the threat for children, and their parents, also lies outside the school walls, in mile upon mile of neighborhoods filled with structures called gecekondu, meaning “landed overnight,” because they were constructed seemingly instantly as hundreds of thousands of migrants from rural regions flowed into the city seeking work in the past decade or two.

more than $20 million will be needed to carry out the plans.  Funding received to date is inadequate, and funding gaps in the education sector have reached their highest levels in the last four years.

Support is urgently needed to establish temporary learning spaces in camps for the internally displaced, support additional classroom space to accommodate new learners in host communities where people have migrated, provide water and sanitation facilities, provide school kits of essential education and recreational material to 435,000 children, provide incentives to 5,750 teachers and strengthen the Community Education Committee’s involvement in schools.

"After decades of neglect and lack of funding, the educational opportunities for school-aged children in Somalia are already dire, so it is imperative that we do everything we can to make sure the situation does not get worse,” said Chorlton.