Bennion, accompanied by a companion missionary, knocks on the metal door of a mobile home in East Anchorage. Maichee Her, 8, peeks out, holding Kevin, a messy-faced baby, on her tiny hip. She grins and moves out of the way. Bennion slips off his shoes, sticks his head in the door and gives a cheerful hello that sounds like "Nya-zhjong!"

Nine people — four adults and five children — live in the two-bedroom double-wide. As is common practice when missionaries visit, grandmother Shoua Vue, 67, sets out two folding chairs. Everyone else sits on the floor.

Bennion functions at once as a spiritual adviser, a counselor, a friend and a social worker. In a given night, he may drink a bowl of spicy noodle soup with a family, arrange the drop-off of a used bunk bed, lead a living-room charades tournament, give advice on where to find work and explain to a circle of children the idea of resurrection using a handful of laminated, crayon-colored characters spread across the floor.

"It's a lot about building a relationship of trust with the family," he said. This family in the East Anchorage mobile home is one of his favorites. He sometimes visits on Mondays, his one weekly personal day, to throw around a football and wrestle with the kids. Two of the adults — Kong Xiong, 26, and his wife, Meng Yang, 19 — have recently converted. The couple have two children, Tou, 4, and Kevin, 1.

Bowing his head, Bennion offers a prayer in Hmong and opens his Book of Mormon to share a passage about the power of conversion:

"(The voice of the Holy Ghost) did pierce them to the very soul, it did cause their hearts to burn," he reads in Hmong.

He asks Xiong to read on. The children bounce behind him on a mattress covered with old clothes. The baby begins to cry.

Yang and Xiong came from Thailand about two years ago, and neither speaks English well. Their decision to convert is in part a matter of pragmatism, she said.

The church offers them a community of people, Hmong and non-Hmong, on which they can draw for help and advice. Already, church people have brought them food, furniture and clothes, including Yang's too-big secondhand shoes.

"The Americans won't let you live miserably," Yang said through a translator. "In Thailand, no one helps. It was miserable.

"If I didn't believe, I was scared they wouldn't help," she said.

Vue, Yang's grandmother, refuses to convert, in part because her husband, who lives in Minnesota, continues to practice the old ways. She is his third wife, and she moved here because he lives with his other wives and their children. Still, if he dies, she believes she must help call his spirit back to Earth.

The spirits of the dead can help or harm the living, she explained.