I also lack this elusive "Third World Perspective" but considering the alarming regularity with which earthquakes shuffle several hundred thousands of their friends, family and neighbours off this mortal coil, perhaps those citizens should, in fact, start encouraging their governments to make building codes and disaster preparation more of a priority.
Your "perhaps they should" reasoning verges a bit into "no bread? let them eat cake" territory.
You can't make buildings safer by decree. It takes resources. Haiti is the poorest country in this hemisphere, by far. (The next poorest countries, Guyana or Nicaragua, are each twice as productive by per capita GDP.)
Even with an accurate idea of the chances (but not certainty) of such a major earthquake, the people and government could quite rationally have decided other more pressing needs deserved all of their meager expenditures.
I'm not sure that you quite understand how poverty works. There are no resources in Haiti, not even arable land. No human capital, nothing to trade. Even if it were possible to build earthquake-resistant buildings, without engineers, out of mud, they couldn't--because the mud was literally all they had to eat:
You're over egging it a little - if they didn't even have building materials to try and eat ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geophagy ) then they wouldn't have buildings that could fall on them.
A mud hut may fall down in an earthquake or blow away in a hurricane but is less likely to kill you when it falls over then a brick or concrete building.
Isn't this more about living within the societal means than simply about poverty: If where I live all cars crash or blow up because we lack resources to produce quality cars then one must accept a bicycle or horse and cart for family transport or suffer the consequences, no?
In a third world country you do not build with what you should build with, you build with what you have, and in any way that it will hold out the elements.
