A promise made to a lwa is understood as binding and enforceable by the lwa, and the standard Haitian analysis of a sustained run of bad luck is that a promise was made and not kept. People make them under pressure — if you get me through this, I will hold a service, I will buy you a dress, I will do this every year — and then the crisis passes and the promise is deferred. The consultation that follows a year of misfortune frequently consists of identifying which promise, made when, to whom, and establishing terms for settling it. The framework is contractual and the vocabulary is commercial: debts, bills, accounts, interest. It is a demanding moral system in one specific respect, in that it takes casual undertakings made in extremity to be fully binding, and it does not accept that the passing of the emergency cancels them.