Instead, they burrow deep into Scripture and prayer, feeding off the energy the concentration foments.

“I’ve had very familiar feelings in a lesson as I have had in a game — the excitement, the energy, feeling like helping your team score a touchdown,” Elder Rennie says. He is walking down a narrow dirt path on the outskirts of the city, on the way to a lesson with a new recruit. The storks munch on rubbish scattered across a field nearby.

Of going back home, he says, “It’s going to be weird.”

Not too long ago they were all in college. Micheal Zackery Lee squeezed in a semester at Westminster College, a liberal arts college in Salt Lake City. James Davis, with the strong handshake, was three semesters into a veterinarian track at Utah State University. At Utah State, 500 students formally pause their studies each year. Ninety percent return, and the university works to help prepare them to re-integrate, including offering an intensive math refresher. Missionaries have been able to pass proficiency tests and get college credit for foreign language.

At Brigham Young University, the Missionary Training Center welcomes hundreds of new missionaries every week from around the world. For up to 12 weeks, they study doctrine, learn how to teach the gospel and hone their communication skills. Some 50 languages are taught at the center, in Provo, Utah, which can accommodate 4,000 learners and has a gymnasium, medical clinic and bookstore. Training centers in other countries also prepare students to serve in one of the church’s roughly 350 missions. They can be sent anywhere. Mitt Romney, for example, served in France.

“I thought I was going to Nebraska,” Elder Dangerfield says, his rosy cheeks betraying a sunburn. “The first week I was here I thought, ‘Where am I?’ ”

First he was in barren northern Uganda for six months, a smudge above the Equator, where malaria and oppressive heat reign. He picked up bits and pieces of the language, Acholi. Now, he traverses the streets of the capital with Michael Chiromo, from Zimbabwe.

Missionaries are paired, six weeks at a time, with a companion — in missionary lingo, the first companion is called “father,” and the second is called “mother.” They stay “within sight and hearing of” each other, according to the handbook they all keep near. “Never be alone,” it warns. Companions will study, pray and proselytize together. Together, they will be caught in populist street demonstrations and taste strange foods — grasshoppers, dog. Rather than with the residents of their host country, where contact consists of managed conversation about their faith, perhaps the most cultural exchange happens among the missionaries themselves.