The idea of joining the Peace Corps entered my mind around the tail end of my senior fall. I didn’t think much of it at first. There was no transcendental memoir I stumbled upon, no moment of profound clarity. It was just in the air.

What I explicitly recall saying is: “If there’s an open position for the Philippines, I’ll apply. Learning Tagalog and impressing my parents couldn’t hurt.” And there were, so I did. Between being a Youth Development Facilitator and a Coastal Resource Manager, I figured dealing with kids would be easier than learning how to snorkel, so I applied to serve as the former.

In any case, my reason for joining wasn’t for the kids or the snorkeling but to experience the Philippines as my parents did. The real Philippines, not just the sliver of the Philippines I see when I spend my day reading Rizal at an air-conditioned mall in Legazpi. And with the Peace Corps’ world-famous language training? A very convenient match.

Why not the Peace Corps, I said in my head. I’m bound to graduate in May — so long as the “senioritis” doesn’t get too bad — and if I can land this gig, I’d feel secure knowing that I have plans postgrad. And I’d have a more interesting resume than peers who took a tangential role in industry, went to grad school, or are currently navigating unemployment. Thus, service became an exciting prospect.

So I applied; applying directly to a country and/or a sector seems to be a decidedly 21st-century luxury for the Peace Corps. But on the off-chance I don’t spend the next two years connecting with Philippine youth, I put down that my second choice would be somewhere in Latin America. For purely utilitarian reasons, it would be supremely helpful to learn Spanish.

I answer each question to the best of my ability. I provide the Peace Corps with a robust retelling of my uneventful medical history. I tell them about my mild shellfish allergy, which I may or may not even actually have.

What I didn’t know was that the Peace Corps, a risk-minimizing organization, would naturally be concerned about volunteer well-being. You know, on the off-chance that their supposedly mild shellfish allergy swells into something life-threatening, and they’re posted someplace without easy access to proper medical care to treat this allergy.

So the Peace Corps, re-assessing my application (my resume is mysteriously full of experiences relating to economics, labor, and climate finance research, but I tried to spin these into being youth-development-relevant ... somehow), decides to consider me for a Community Economic Development position in El Salvador.

There’s a part of me that’s heartbroken, but there’s a bigger part of me that’s confused. I look at my phone screen, and I see my future: El Salvador. Not quite the country I had in mind. I could try to fight it, appeal, but I’ve heard nightmare stories about medical clearance, and I didn’t like my odds.

I relent, which didn’t take me too long, and realize that there’s a reasonable explanation here: somebody sitting at a desk, concerned about a bagoong-related shrimp disaster turned deadly, decided that my resume was well-suited for CED. Coincidentally, they needed to staff up their El Salvador program, which had only just reopened in the last two years.

Alas, the storybook “Filipino-American prodigal son of the diaspora joins the Peace Corps to return to the old country to self-actualize and save the Filipino children who never made it out” doesn’t materialize.

Fate or whatever decides to send me to El Salvador — El Pulgarcito de América, the boot of Central America, its own little thumb — a country the size of Massachusetts that I know next to nothing about. A country with which I have no backstory, and my explanation for being there does not come with a weighty vocation.

In retrospect, I’m grateful.

There are a few reasons why. For one, being posted to El Salvador avoids a fundamental skills mismatch; I’d sooner teach adults personal finance than work with kids.

And more importantly, I’m afforded a productive sense of “remove.” If I were a Filipino in the Philippines, it would be easier to assimilate and embed myself, no doubt, but my position would be unclear. A Filipino in El Salvador — a Filipino-American but a Filipino nonetheless — has defined boundaries, and I can always defer back to my being a foreigner and a Peace Corps volunteer, in a way that’s comparatively more clear-cut than the Philippine case.

One limiting factor of this ideology, though, is that I’m held back in terms of language capabilities and cultural immersion — arguably the most crucial part of the job. But it’s worth the trade-off, maybe. And maybe this is more in the spirit of the organization — being sent someplace you have no ties and being forever changed in the process. The fact is, I probably would not have chosen El Salvador on my own.

So I’m grateful to the shrimp — to the shrimp scampi Ryan made sophomore year that made my throat itch. The shrimp afforded me a better fit. But maybe that’s me trying to make sense of a bureaucratic decision that came about from a genetic accident.

I can’t help but circle back to the concept of legibility, flattening a situation to make it make sense for whoever’s doing the looking. This shrimp scandal is legibility in miniature. Maybe if I were posted to the Philippines, I’d have a rationale for it, too.

I’ve been pretty vocal about the Peace Corps application process to my friends, from when I first conceptualized the idea of serving in the Philippines, to getting the conditional invite, all the way to my last day in the house in Urbana I spent my senior year in. I moved out August 2, which is exactly a week before I fly out to Miami for staging.

One of those people whose ear I talked off about the Peace Corps was my roommate Sam, who considered joining as well, but decided against it. His position, once we got into it, was: “Why not just live in El Salvador? Why rely on joining a government apparatus to be there?

To that, I said, “I’m going to look like an American whatever I do — might as well have a mandate for it, and do it on Uncle Sam’s dime.”

Said out loud, the concept of the Peace Corps — and its continued existence — is kind of fascinating. For all its faults, an agency with Kennedy-era origins is what makes a non-extractive presence structurally possible.

What Sam proposed carries its own set of risks — financial, employment, visa issues — and absorbing them is itself a kind of privilege. My presence in El Salvador comes with an expiration date and a charge that I will be held to; I come there with a job, and what’s more, an obligation. But does legitimizing my presence just mean that the apparatus is working as intended? And is this Substack complicit?

This blog, born partly to accomplish Goal 3 of Peace Corps service, operates by using honest, layered essays that wrestle with ambiguity as a proxy for a true lived experience — complete with all the tensions and complications inherent to service. In doing so, I hope to bring El Salvador back home, to make it legible for those whose idea of the country merely exists in simple heuristics.

But the blog itself is a translation act, with all the power asymmetries the form carries — and legibility is really about who controls the translation. What most people understand about El Salvador starts and ends with a single word: violence. Will my writing unconsciously reinforce that?

Ivan Illich, Catholic priest and social critic (which is admittedly a pretty underbaked summary of him), would have a blunt response to my question: Yes, unambiguously.

In his scathing 1968 speech, “To Hell with Good Intentions,” Illich takes down the Peace Corps as part of a paternalistic apparatus of U.S. volunteerism. The distance between a well-educated, middle-class American volunteer and the people they come to help, he argues, is far too great. Unwittingly or not, volunteers become “vacationing salesmen for the middle-class ‘American Way of Life.’”

There’s a quote from that speech I think about often:

Even the Peace Corps spends around $10,000 on each corps member to help him adapt to his new environment and to guard him against culture shock. How odd that nobody ever thought about spending money to educate poor Mexicans in order to prevent them from the culture shock of meeting you?

Illich is one voice of many in the development discourse, and one of the more radical ones to boot. But his skepticism haunted me. So I spent the summer before service reading development theory instead of studying Spanish — concerned, I guess, with a different kind of fluency.

In undergrad, I didn’t study economics out of conviction; I picked it for legibility reasons — a word I only have now, in retrospect. Development, my major concentration, was the exception. It wasn't as clear-cut as environmental economics, where everybody agrees a carbon tax would work, to the chagrin of the public.

In the development economics world, the marginalists and the institutionalists were still fighting it out, and no one could agree if aid helped or hurt — a real argument instead of a settled one. It turned out to be a fight I was good at.

I took plenty of classes on business, agriculture, trade, and development — Paul McNamara’s agriculture-in-development course chief among them — plus a statistics minor. I was trained in orthodox theory, but taught with enough rigor that when I later ran into the people arguing against it, I could tell what, exactly, they were arguing against.

Yet I spent a lot of time rolling my eyes at isoquants, unsure what the math was actually for, as I spent my time organizing for fossil fuel divestment on the side.

I took David Albouy’s urban economics class my junior year, and the graphs turned out to be good for something. Office hours — where we didn’t just talk about congestion pricing and rent control — became a standing argument, him unconvinced divestment did anything, me unable to fully prove him wrong. Meanwhile, Matt Soener in sociology was doing the only serious political economy on campus, but I never built the same fluency there.

Economics hands you axioms: a language built sturdy enough to throw back at somebody, made to survive an argument. I don’t have that fluency with Soener’s material. I can feel what he’s getting at, but my understanding of history and theory was too lackluster to meaningfully push back.

That tension split my summer reading list down the middle. On one side were the institutionalists and econometrics-driven reformers like Albert O. Hirschman; on the other were critics like the Jameses — Ferguson and Scott.

I was particularly drawn to Ferguson’s The Anti-Politics Machine, a critique of a development project that failed largely because the technocrats ignored the nuances of Basotho social relations (worth a read for the “bovine mystique” alone, honestly). In its epilogue discussing alternatives, he writes:

Anthropologists come cheap; they do not require big budgets or equipment or laboratories. What they do require is on-site room and board, inter-personal connections with a broad range of informants, and a stimulating intellectual context.

This gap — what technocrats missed — is what Scott calls métis in Seeing Like a State: hyper-local knowledge built from repetition and lived experience, the kind that lets someone actually thrive in a place, what gives them the finesse to deal with hyper-local problems.

Legibility, the word I’d been reaching for since the shrimp story, is what Scott calls its opposite — the state’s need to flatten that knowledge into something it can read and administer. These detractors favor métis over legibility: not solutions handed down from a desk that’s never set foot there, but ones built from a community’s own dignity and knowledge.

I don’t see how the Peace Corps’ charge is any different — all I need are four walls and a cot. But Illich would likely object: a two-year volunteer is no substitute for a trained anthropologist embedded in — and accountable to — a genuinely “counter-hegemonic” movement.

Looking back, my summer reading list wasn’t just prep for El Salvador — it was the continuation of an old internal fight. Choosing economics for its rigid, arguable axioms forced me to constantly evaluate what I held as truths and the values I take with me.

Now, in choosing the Peace Corps, I’m doing it again: opting for the safety of a state-sanctioned mandate over the unscripted risk of just moving abroad. I have always compromised toward legibility.

During the summer, I also read Carolyn Forché’s What You Have Heard Is True and Mark Danner’s The Massacre at El Mozote. What I extracted from these, other than some sense of recent Salvadoran history, is the idea of witness.

Forché’s book is interesting precisely because she is not the most interesting part of the book; it’s Leonel Gómez Vides, the Salvadoran activist who sponsors her and takes her to the countryside to see El Salvador for herself. Writing the novel, she knows she’s not Vides, the mysterious, well-read organizer. Her job is to translate El Salvador for an American audience — because the testimony has to go somewhere. She’s writing before the civil war, but while its seeds are being sown.

Every place has an atmosphere. 19th-century economist Alfred Marshall once wrote that the secrets of a place are “as it were in the air,” learned unconsciously by the people who breathe it. I think that’s another name for Scott’s métis.

Vides operates in an atmosphere he never had to translate for himself; he can move between the Salvadoran countryside and American political circles, code-switching between organizer and interlocutor, precisely because his understanding of El Salvador is drawn from the air he breathes. Forché's atmosphere, to Vides’ benefit, is American. But while he can show her the countryside and suffering, he can’t hand her his air.

I’ll be in the same position she was. The air I carry is the one I’ve never had to name: economic security, institutional backing, and an American passport. I don’t know what a remittance economy feels like from inside a household. I don’t know what U.S. foreign policy looks like once you’re standing in what it left behind — all I’ve got is the archives collected by Danner.

I don’t know what “development” means to the people it’s supposedly for.

Illich would say that’s exactly the problem; the only thing saying it aloud does is make me self-aware. What good is that? Ultimately, I’d be occupying a role a Salvadoran could fill better.

But there’s no pleasing Illich either way. I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t, and if I let this back-and-forth run any longer, I’ll lose the name of action entirely.

My senior year AP Spanish teacher, Sr. Galanes, taught us this proverb: El camarón que se duerme se lo lleva la corriente— the shrimp that falls asleep gets carried off by the current. Fitting, since a shrimp had already carried me off once before — a mild allergy, a bowl of shrimp scampi, a desk in Washington re-routing me to El Salvador. I never got the luxury of falling asleep on this one either.

The shrimp decided first, same as it always does, apparently. Gracias, camarón, for not giving me the chance to overthink it. And gracias, Sr. Galanes, for handing me, years ago, the exact proverb I’d need.

No more falling asleep on this one, then.

The fact is, all systems are compromised. Development is easy to deconstruct only because it says its intentions out loud. It publishes a theory of change and subsequently invites the critique. They don’t write white papers on what two years abroad does to a 22-year-old. But it happens anyway.

We can argue all we want about what the Peace Corps is and what it isn’t — what it can and cannot do. What is the Peace Corps? It’s going to be bad Spanish, a gauntlet of humiliation and trial-and-error. It’s going to be human.

In Living Poor, Moritz Thomsen (RPCV Ecuador ‘65 – ‘68) wrote about how, for all of his efforts, all he did in his community was create a new equilibrium, neither better nor worse, just changed. Thomsen changed. Some lives in his community changed. Others stayed exactly the same.

I can’t promise outcomes. I can’t even promise I’m right to go. What I can tell you is that I’ve read enough of the case against me to lose the argument on paper and get on the plane anyway. That doesn’t make me less paternalistic than the volunteer who hasn’t read Illich — the effects on the ground don’t care what I’ve read. It just means I can’t tell myself a clean story about what I’m doing.

This is where Hirschman earns his place. His theory of the “hiding hand” says the not-knowing isn’t a flaw in the plan; it’s the condition under which any good future-proof plan gets made at all. What technocrats need more of is a tolerance for ambiguity — twists and turns. Even Ferguson agrees that the projects that backfire are also legitimate learning experiences.

Illich could show me the whole shape of what I might do wrong in El Salvador, and it wouldn’t change anything, because the shape only exists in hindsight. I can’t see that far from here. If I could, I’d never get on the plane. I wrestled with this concept in my first column.

So I’ll end with this. In Invisible Cities, Marco Polo tells Kublai Khan, “You take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.” I’m not going to be able to explain El Salvador any better than Forché could, or any better than this essay has managed to explain my own leaving. But El Salvador will answer a question I never knew I had — and that’s worth something.

The contents of this blog are mine personally and do not reflect the views of the U.S. government, the Peace Corps, or the Salvadoran government.

Jim Hinterlong’s pencil was already moving on the sticky note. “It kind of looks like this,” he said. “They’ll show you this same graph at training.”

He traced the rise, then the fall. “There’s a peak around four months. Then it starts going down.”

He tapped a point on the downslope. “Six months or so — could be earlier, or later — that’s the lowest point.” He drew an arrow pointing straight down. “Your projects start failing. You realize you’ll be there a while. It wasn’t what you expected. That’s when people tend to quit.”

He circled the bottom of the curve, then traced a second rise, shooting straight up. “But if you stick with it, it picks back up.” He drew an arrow along the new incline. “It never gets quite as high. But this is where the learning starts.”

Now the director of the YMCA on the University of Illinois campus, Jim had served in Malawi himself from 1992 to 1994. When I told him about my invitation to serve, he animatedly discussed his experience. “At the low point,” he said, “it helps to have an answer to the question, ‘What do you want?’”

Some facts first, for whoever’s arriving without context: I’m Raphael, I graduated from the University of Illinois this past spring, and on August 11, I leave for El Salvador to serve as a Community Economic Development volunteer with the Peace Corps — two years and three months, working alongside a community on whatever they’ve decided they need, which I won’t fully know until I get there. It’s delightfully ambiguous. I wrote about why in a companion essay. This one’s about why I write, point blank.

I still have that sticky note. I don’t have an answer yet — how could I? — but I’ve been writing toward one since I was a kid.

When I was younger, I wanted to be a train engineer or an archeologist who punched Nazis. That was just me mimicking what I’d seen on TV, as kids tend to do.

I was sensitive, though. Not really the Nazi-punching type. In fourth grade, I found a life hack: if I asked politely, my teacher would let me skip recess to type out the stories I’d written in my journal during afternoon free time. The one time she told me to pick a different activity instead, I read a Bone comic — then promptly went back to writing the next day. Writing was important, soul-cleansing. The most useful thing I could do with my afternoon, thought nine-year-old me.

I don’t know if there’s a “type” of Peace Corps Volunteer anymore, the way there’s a type of kid who processes life by writing. Maybe, once upon a time, only globetrotting hippies became PCVs. But my formation makes me well-suited for service as a CED volunteer — and also that I’m constitutionally incapable of writing a normal blog. I should say that I majored in economics (with a raised eyebrow), and I wrote opinion columns for the student newspaper.

My writerly sensibilities from fourth grade never left. The most important thing The Daily Illini gave me was four years of using columns — proper literary essay-writing — as the mechanism for understanding what I think.

The whole point was process, not performance. I was trained to write in public, as part of some larger dialogue. Few undergrads get four years of a real byline and an editor who trusts them with two thousand words. Most of my generation skipped that training entirely; we learned to perform in public long before we learned to think in public, and those aren’t the same muscle. I’m grateful for the mistakes, too — the columns I’d write differently now, the ones I’d have cut a third of.

All this to say, I can’t squander the training I’ve been given. As an homage or perhaps out of necessity, I’ve co-opted the essayistic and diaristic styles of DI opinion writing for this blog: Field Notes and Letters Home, respectively.

That habit carried over even if the territory itself didn’t. Unless you were around for the blogging subculture (I was not), it isn’t familiar ground — but the instinct is the same one the DI built. The idea of the opinion columnist itself is a vestige of a bygone age, when people actually looked to columnists for something.

For that reason, starting a Substack in 2026 means dressing up like a millennial to say something I mean. Most other PCVs are making Instagram pages, recording TikToks — the platforms that actually fit their age, and, not incidentally, the platforms that actually reach people. Some keep blogs too, and theirs are good! This one’s going to be weirder: essays, in a format and a subculture I was tragically too young for. My training in anachronisms is robust.

There’s a real irony buried in that choice: Goal 3 of Peace Corps service is bringing the world back home, making the rest of it legible to people who’ll never leave the country, and a 60-second TikTok does that job better than I ever will. Whether that’s a better trade or just a more comfortable one for me is not a question I can answer yet.

I don’t mean to sound bitter about long-form writing going out of vogue. After all, it demands a level of attention a TikTok doesn’t ask for. And, more often than not, it’s hard to justify the length. But I can’t help it: my instinct is to sit down and write thousands of words about what I think is happening.

For those of you who know me, I know what it looks like. Of course, Raphael has a Substack. Of course, the guy who wrote an ode to a campus squirrel found a new way to keep yapping. But being sent to El Salvador isn’t a backdrop for a Substack I’d have started anyway — it’s the reason this whole project exists at all. The difference is that I’ll be embedded, living and working with people under pressures that I can’t invent from a desk in Urbana.

Put differently, take away the assignment, and there’s nothing to write from. If it turns out I have something useful to say, it’ll be because of what happens there, not because I found a stage to wax lengthily postgrad.

The idea of an audience still feels foreign. With the DI, I never wrote down to anyone. I trusted readers could handle economics concepts, metaphors about whales, or whatever else I threw at them.

Here, the imagined readers are more scattered: the Salvadoran kid who finds these letters and laughs at how much I write (I joked in my farewell column that they’d say “escribes mucho,” and I’m hoping that prophecy will fulfill itself); the future PCV Googling for packing lists and getting hit with development theory instead; the friend back home who checks in every few weeks wondering how I’m coping.

Hopefully it looks like I’m doing well; I don’t know.

I’m not above the temptation inherent to blogging as a form: condensing something as messy as leaving home, language, and the people who know you into something tangible I can point to and grasp.

Call it legibility — the same thing Goal 3 asks of me, the same thing I’m asking of my own life when I try to explain it to someone on WhatsApp.

I said a TikTok does that job better than I ever will. I was being slightly reductive; I know what gets lost in the optimizing. It might even get closer to the truth than a 60-second TikTok could. That’s the hope, at least — and I suspect it’s a hope I’ll keep reassessing.

The closer I get to departing, the more I realize what I’m actually leaving behind: plays my friends are going to put on, karaoke in Chicago, my parents, and my dog. Is there any way to rectify that kind of abandonment without some framework to justify it? I don’t think so.

All I can do is be honest — with you, or the Salvadoran kid, or the future PCV, or whoever’s doing the bimonthly check-in. That’s different from sanctifying something. I want this Substack to stay unadorned: no sense of superiority, no pretending to “know.” The best I can do is keep it from curdling into some melodrama about a duty to tell stories.

Really, though — who am I writing this for?

Oh.

It’s me. These hypothetical readers are really just that — hypothetical. I can’t be certain any one of these scenarios will be true, but if there’s one thing I can guarantee, it’s that come November 2028, I will be reading all of these entries carefully just to cringe at how bright-eyed I was, writing toward what I want before I know what exactly that even is. A message in a bottle addressed to me on the other side of service.

It’s clearly too early for me to have an answer to Jim’s question: “What do you want?”

I haven’t left, so my answer at the end of college hasn’t really changed: I want to leave a trace. But that phrase I only wrote because I was leaving the DI. This project is just beginning.

So maybe if I write enough, if I’m persistent with this Substack thing, I’ll have a better answer. Whoever’s reading this, in whatever year — am I getting close?

Raphael will be a Community Economic Development volunteer in El Salvador.

The contents of this blog are mine personally and do not reflect the views of the U.S. government, the Peace Corps, or the Salvadoran government.