The College La Promesse Evangelique was a church-operated school, one of thousands of private institutions that fill the gap left by Haiti's underfunded public education system. In a country where the government has historically struggled to provide universal schooling, churches, NGOs, and private operators run the majority of schools - often in buildings constructed without permits, without inspections, and without the structural engineering that keeps concrete from becoming a coffin. The builder of La Promesse reportedly told Haitian President Rene Preval that the school had been built with hardly any structural steel or cement to hold its concrete blocks together. He had done it all himself. The cause of the collapse was never officially determined, but residents of Petion-Ville had a simpler explanation: the building was poorly made, and everyone could see it except the man who built it.

When the building fell, the school day was well underway. Students sat in classrooms on the first and second floors - the third floor was reportedly less occupied. The collapse was sudden. Concrete floors pancaked downward, trapping children beneath rubble that rescue workers would spend days trying to move. At least 200 people were treated at hospitals across Port-au-Prince, with Trinite Hospital and the University of Haiti Hospital receiving the bulk of the injured. Some children arrived with crushing injuries. Others arrived with the dust still on them, carried by neighbors who had started digging before any official help arrived.

By the next day, November 8, rescue teams had pulled 35 students alive from the wreckage - 13 girls and 22 boys. Their survival, against the weight of failed concrete, offered the only counterpoint to a death toll that kept climbing.

Help came from several directions. The Dominican Republic sent two helicopters to evacuate the injured across the shared border of Hispaniola. The U.S. Agency for International Development dispatched a disaster response team, including 38 search-and-rescue specialists from Virginia and four rescue dogs, led by Captain Michael Istvan of the Fairfax County Urban Search and Rescue team. Fifteen firefighters and doctors arrived from Martinique under the direction of Daniel Vigee. Medecins sans Frontieres mobilized. For a few days, the world paid attention to a collapsed school in a Haitian suburb.

Then, five days later, it happened again. Portions of Grace Divine School in Port-au-Prince also collapsed - a different building, a different school, the same underlying failure. Haiti's construction crisis was not an aberration. It was a pattern, one that the international community would confront on a catastrophic scale fourteen months later when the January 2010 earthquake killed over 200,000 people, many of them in buildings that should never have been built the way they were.

Petion-Ville is not a slum. Named after Alexandre Petion, one of Haiti's founding fathers, it sits in the hills above Port-au-Prince and is home to much of the capital's middle class, its embassies, and its wealthier residents. That a school here could be built without basic structural integrity speaks to a failure that transcends poverty. Haiti had building codes. It had a government. What it lacked was enforcement - the regulatory infrastructure that ensures a man who says he does not need an engineer is not permitted to build a school for 700 children.

The school's owner was arrested after the collapse. But no systemic reform followed. The pattern of unregulated construction continued. When journalist Jonathan M. Katz wrote his account of Haiti's recurring crises, he chose the La Promesse collapse for his prologue - not because it was the worst disaster, but because it contained, in miniature, everything that would make the 2010 earthquake so devastating. The buildings were the message. They had been saying it for years.