To prepare, he was dispatched to a missionary training center in Provo, Utah. He was told to bring suits and ties and to have his sideburns shaved no lower than the middle of the ear. (Female missionaries, meanwhile, wear skirts that cover the entire knee when standing or sitting.) In Provo, for nine weeks, he spent fourteen-hour days learning Bulgarian and studying scripture.

Alex bid goodbye to his girlfriend, whom he would only be allowed to call once, on Christmas. The other phone call he was allowed each year of the mission was to his mother, on Mother’s Day. (These days, missionaries are allowed to contact their families more frequently.) He was assigned a companion who would be constantly at his side. Two days into missionary training, he became so depressed he cried.

Alex decided to make the best of the situation, but on the ground in Bulgaria, missionary life was similarly regimented. He and other missionaries would wake each day at 6:30 a.m. and exercise for thirty minutes. They’d study in solitude for an hour, then eat breakfast, then study with a companion for another hour. Then they would take to the streets, knocking on doors or stopping pedestrians on the sidewalk to tell them about the church. All day long, Alex repeated variations on “I’d like to share a short message about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” over and over again, dawn till dusk. At night he had an hour of journaling before lights out. The next day would be exactly the same. There was no slacking off, since every night he reported to a leader. There were also no movies, arcades, or bowling allies. His only days off were for laundry.

Alex found that the Bulgarians were not especially eager to become Mormons. Most Bulgarians belong to the Orthodox Church, though only a small percentage attend services regularly.220 To Alex, the country seemed unusually hostile to Mormons, specifically. A 2015 State Department report221 described fourteen instances of physical assault and harassment on Mormon missionaries in the country, including one in which three missionaries in the town of Shumen were beaten and their property defaced with antireligious graffiti. Ultimately, the Shumen missionaries had to close their church. According to Alex, some local Bulgarian papers printed articles urging kids to throw rocks at missionaries, or alleging that Mormons eat babies. He was heartened when one day he saw a more positive article. It read something like, “Mormons: Not as bad as you think.”

So it’s perhaps unsurprising that all day long, every time he knocked on a door, Alex mostly heard the same answer: Ne, ne, ne. No. I’m not interested. Because of Bulgarians’ antagonism toward the faith, the goal for each missionary in Bulgaria was just two baptisms into the church, compared with the two or three hundred new acolytes that Alex said missionaries in some South American countries were expected to recruit.