In 1933, the American University in Beirut inaugurated what it called the Village Recovery Program, through which this elite educational institution dispatched teams of students and professionals to the countryside to “modernize” rural society. Over the course of the decade, the program expanded with several teams of volunteers spending months at a time in the field and considerable government and press attention to their activities. By 1938, Syrian officials had incorporated similar programs. Authorities saw the benefits of the program as two-way. From the “cultured youth,” as the newspapers called the program’s volunteers, the peasants would learn modern techniques of agriculture and hygiene, abetted by both chemicals to kill the Sunn Pest, scourge of regional agriculture, and medicine to cure infectious diseases. From the peasants, the cultured youth would connect with the national essence that their privileged urban positions alienated them from. Yet while the aim of the rural development program was strengthening the connection between these two groups and the nation, the Syrian government’s appropriation of the program also coincided with an effort to keep peasants in their particular physical place; while officials lamented the backwardness of peasants, they also bemoaned their steady migration to cities. Thus, while the Village Recovery Program was about reforming peasants, it was also about firmly attaching them to their respective villages. One report on rural education encapsulated this point in sartorial terms, declaring that though peasants would attend school, they would not leave wearing tarbushes, the cylindrical hats-cum-markers of urban modernity preferred by city effendis. The goal of this paper is to examine two layers of the Village Recovery Program and related rural development projects: the first, embodied by the Sunn Pest, has to do with state efforts to eradicate this and other vermin and diseases through chemical, medical, and architectural alterations to the rural environment; the second layer, symbolized by the tarbush, has to do with the societal tensions embedded in the ambivalent relationship between urban professional youth and the rural subjects of their uplift projects. Studies of nationalism and modernity in mandate Syria – including those by Gelvin, Thompson, and Watenpaugh, among others – have almost exclusively framed these projects as rooted in urban spaces. By examining the Village Recovery Program, I hope to suggest that rural inhabitants and urban residents’ imagination of them were also crucially constitutive factors in the articulation of social roles and the delineation of state responsibility.