White Fields II

M. Rowton

June 4th, 2026

Author’s note: 

This is part two of a three part series. You can find part one here. The author's wife has advised him on the spelling of the name of the movement as "Pente" or "P'ent'ay", not "Pentay" as we did before.

Part 2: Eliyas

“The Scripture teaches that the only truly free people in the world are those who have made Christ their Savior. Jesus Christ said, ‘You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free’” Rev. Billy Graham, 1963

Sometime in 1983, on a dusty road somewhere in Ethiopia’s Oromo region, the first of three miracles occurs. A truck loaded with men, making its way towards a large military base to the east, slows down to avoid a pothole in the road—and a young man drops from the back, rolling to the side of the road and lying still.

It was, he realises, a stupid thing to have done. The driver will see him in the wing mirror, or one of his companions in the back will raise the alarm.

The truck will stop, come back, and then he will be beaten – or shot.

But the truck does not stop. It speeds up as it rounds the pothole, kicking up a cloud of red dust behind it as it fades from view.

The young man lies still until long after the truck has disappeared, before getting up, brushing himself off, and beginning the long walk back towards town.

Forty years later, Hannaa and I are making our way to my in-laws’ house, winding our way up into the hilly suburbs around Addis.

From up here, I can see almost the whole of Addis: glass towers and broad new roads punching through a mess of narrow streets and dusty low-rises.

As we drive through the remnants of one of the old slums that used to ring the city, Hannaa tells me to roll up my window.

“They will steal from you,” she says, pointing to a group of young men sitting by the side of the road.

A moment later, we cross an invisible line that seems to mark its boundary, emerging onto a clean concrete road flanked by modest new-build houses, their flat roofs peeking out from behind high concrete walls.

My father-in-law, Eliyas, is waiting at the bottom of the road to make sure we’ve arrived safely. As we leave the taxi, he leans in and says something to the driver, before ushering us into the little compound that encloses his house– shooing away a group of young boys that have gathered outside the battered metal gate.

“They are waiting for food,” Hannaa explains, “We will give them some of the lunch.”

As we head into the front courtyard, I look up at my parents-in-law's house – a low concrete structure composed of clean lines and sharp corners. To me, it looks more like a military outpost than a place to live.

Entering the front room, I find several older men already sitting around the large plastic table at its centre, drinking mineral water and talking quietly. I recognise most of them from a previous visit, when I had assumed they were Eliyas’ friends.

I was told later by my wife that this was not the case. Eliyas has no real friends, and these men are ‘honourable members of the community’, who are habitually invited these kinds of events.

Harmeh, my parents-in-law's adopted daughter, is playing in the corner with a little yellow handbag I brought as a gift from the UK. Seeing us enter, she pushes herself up and makes a flat-footed dash across the room, holding out her handbag in front of her.

As a newborn, Harmeh was abandoned at a hairdresser’s by an old woman while my mother-in-law was getting a haircut. The police were called, but everyone agreed it would be better not to send her to an orphanage. Two years later, she is my parents-in-law’s daughter.

Arriving at my feet, she holds the little handbag up towards me. Lately, Harmeh has taken to bringing me ‘presents’, which take the form of whatever she finds lying around the house. Last time I was here, she brought me Eliyas’ personal bible, stuffed full of business receipts, which was the cause of a great deal of entertainment in the room.

Accepting her gift in one arm and scooping her up under the other, I stand by the doorway for a moment while she gently tugs on my hair­, expecting Eliyas to offer me a seat. Instead, he gestures for me to put down my bag before turning and saying something to Hannaa.

“Before lunch, he will show you the new house.” Hannaa explains, “You can go now.”

As we turn to leave the men at the table bristle; they were expecting some conversation with the visitor, but Eliyas waves them off, flashing me a rare smile.

I remember that he’s missing a front tooth, which I heard he lost in a fight some twenty years ago.

Putting Harmeh down and turning back towards the door, I ask Hannaa to come with us. I feel bad for dragging her along, I suspect she would rather be with my mother-in-law and the other cousins, but I need her to translate.

Even the few Amharic phrases I know are useless with Eliyas, because he speaks Afan Oromo, the language of the Oromo people to whom my wife and her family belong. For a second, Hannaa seems to hesitate. Picking up on my intention, Eliyas gestures for her to come, and she quietly obliges.

Making our way back out through the courtyard, I see that the driver is waiting for us. Eliyas must have instructed him to do so when we arrived.

Opening the door for Hannaa, I get into the back with her while Eliyas takes a seat next to the driver, and we begin our way back down, skirting the edge of Addis.

The drive is uncomfortably quiet. Eliyas barely seems to notice anyone is in the car with him, staring out over the city with a serious expression. Hannaa has retreated into silence.

As we sink dumbly towards the city, I see an opportunity to ask Eliyas about the Pente and try and think of a subtle way to bring the topic up. Failing, I settle on a blunt approach.

“Eliyas, I’ve never been told. How did you become Pente?”

Listening to Hannaa translate, he replies without turning away from the window, watching Addis rise up from beneath him.

“He says he was in darkness," Hannaa tells me “, and he was shown the light.”

“I want to know more about why people joined during the communist years,” I say. “I’ve heard it was dangerous to be Pente at the time.”

As Hannaa translates, Eliyas turns away from the window with a serious expression.

“If you like, he says he will tell you about a miracle.”

Without waiting for my response, Eliyas begins, pausing now and again for Hannaa to catch up.

“When he was young, his aunt's husband became sick. He was the headmaster of the local school, and a communist. The headmaster taught him a saying, ‘The foreigner comes with the Bible in one hand and Capitalism in the other.’”

Eliyas stops to chuckle at the memory before him, and Hannaa, continue.

“God chose to strike the headmaster; he fell down onto his bed, and everyone knew that he would die soon. No one knew Eliyas was in town then, because he was hiding from the army in my mother’s house. He was afraid, because the headmaster could have reported him to the communists. But God told him to pray for him – so he went to his house and prayed over his bed with his wife and daughter.”

Eliyas stops, and Hannaa finishes her translation.

“Then, the man was healed, and he was saved.”

With his story complete, Eliyas turns to look out of the window again, and the car lapses back into silence.

Unable to think of anything else to say, I sit quietly until finally the car slows, turning off the main road and into an area very similar to the one we have come from; a cluster of one-story new builds, all in various stages of construction.

Despite being closer to Addis proper, our descent has put us below the vast suburbs that surround it, and I can no longer see the city.

Turning into the open courtyard of the ‘new house’ as Eliyas calls it, we leave the taxi and begin to make our way inside. I know Eliyas’s eagerness to show this to me isn’t about the building itself but is more about what it represents: a culmination in his own personal story.

My wife calls her father ‘the perfect capitalist.’

He grew up very poor; my wife tells me that he could not afford shoes as a child. I’m told he still refuses to own more than one pair at a time.

Today, having painfully dragged his way up into the precarious middle class, he has built enough capital to move into petty real estate. I’m told his strategy for the last five years has been simple: buy a piece of land, build a house on it, and then sell it for profit.

In that sense, he’s a man in the right place at the right time. I hear that house prices around Addis have soared, and that Eliyas is making more money than he ever has before.

As we head inside the half-formed building, the afternoon light pours in through unfinished windows, painting long white bars across the dusty floor. For a moment, I feel as though I might be in a little chapel.

“It’s very nice,” I say, and mean it.

Eliyas smiles.

“He says it was difficult to build," Hannah says. "Materials are very expensive now.”

I ask Eliyas when the house will be finished, and he tells Hannaa it will be soon.

“He wants to sell quickly. We don’t know what will happen to prices next year.”

“Will you build more houses after this?”

“Of course, but he will wait and see what happens. If prices go down, then it will be a good time to buy. Then, he might build two.”

“What about labour?” I ask, “That must be cheap now, because of the war?”

Eliyas laughs.

“He says labour is always cheap,” Hannaa tells me.

I’m curious about Eliyas’ relationship to the men he hires to build these houses, I’ve already been told by my wife that he spent time as a labourer himself in his youth, but I don’t want to question him too bluntly.

Instead, I remember the evangelical festival Hannaa invited me to.

“Eliyas, what do you know about Franklin Graham?”

Hannaa smiles at the mention of the event and begins a short back and forth with her uncle.

After a minute, she turns back to me. “He knows Billy Graham. He says people used to share tapes of his sermons back in the communist years.”

I ask if Graham influenced Eliyas to convert from Orthodoxy, and he gives me a surprised look.

“No,” says Hannaa. “He says Billy Graham was a man who cared about Africa, but it was the missionaries who brought us out of darkness.”

“You met a missionary when you were young?” I ask.

“He didn’t,” Hannaa explains, “but he knew they built the schools and the hospital in his hometown.”

“So, who convinced you to convert then?”

“Many people,” Hannaa says. “There have been Pente in our region for a long time — lots of different churches.”

“What kinds of churches?” I ask. “I know the family are Pentecostal.”

“Yes,” Hannaa says. “But not all of us. Some of the older people became Mekana Yesus when they converted.”

I’ve heard of Mekana Yesus before from my wife, a Lutheran church—one of the oldest protestant groups in the country.

I ask Hannaa if there is any tension from having different denominations in the same family.

She seems confused by the question.

“We’re all Pente,” she says. “We’re the same.”

At this point Eliyas interrupts, and him and Hannaa enter into a short conversation.

“He says the old church never cared about the Oromo,” Hannaa explains after a moment.

“They didn’t preach in our language. His parents were Christians, but they knew nothing. His aunt had gone to a missionary school, and she told him that the missionaries had translated the Bible for us.”

I wonder whether Eliyas’s parents were upset that he left the old Church, but Hannaa tells me they were not.

“He says his father was a drinker,” she tells me. “He didn’t care what Eliyas did.”

I look at Eliyas, and he turns away from me, his eyes flicking over the bars of white light that stretch across the floor.

“After his father was gone," Hannaa explains, "he taught his mother the gospel.”

I ask if Eliyas thinks education is an important part of being a Christian.

“Of course,” Hannaa translates. “How can you teach the gospel if you can’t read or write? He says the old Church and the emperor never wanted to teach us anything.”

“What about the communists?” I ask. “Were they worse than the empire?”

Eliyas laughs, and Hannaa looks surprised as she listens to him explain.

“He says he liked the communists when he was a child. They killed the emperor. They built schools.”

“What changed then?” I ask.

She listens for a moment before answering.

“They sent us to war,” she says. “In the end, he thinks they were no different.”

I ask whether things improved after the communists were overthrown.

“No. He says the communists were bad and soulless men — but when they were overthrown, the Oromo got nothing.”

She pauses again as he continues.

“It will always be the same.”

I ask why that is, and Hannaa seems to hesitate as she listens to Eliyas answer.

“He says that Ethiopia cannot be ruled well,” she eventually offers. “You have to do things for yourself.”

My phone rings and, seeing that it’s my wife, I answer.

“Can I talk to my father?” she asks, “My mother has been trying to call him.”

I hand the phone over to Eliyas, and he and my wife begin what sounds to me like an argument.

Eliyas passes the phone back to me, and my wife explains.

“He was told to wait until after lunch to show you the house, but he is so stubborn. Now my mother is upset.”

Eliyas stands by the entrance looking indignant, and for a moment I think he is about to defy his daughter and keep us in the empty house. Instead, he walks through the doorframe and signals to the taxi driver that we are about to leave.

As we get back into the taxi, Eliyas turns and says something to me.

“He wants to know how his daughter is,” Hannaa says.

I tell him she’s doing well. She went back to university a few years ago and graduated last spring. She has a new job, and she’s been learning to swim.

As Hannaa translates, I notice an odd expression creeping across Eliyas’ face. Then, as he looks at me, I realise there are tears in his eyes.

Belatedly, I understand the real reason I was brought to the house—so that Eliyas could talk to me about his daughter away from the ears of his guests.

Instead, I have spent the trip asking him questions about his childhood.

“Naboonsiteh,” Eliyas says, looking out of the car window again. “I am proud of her.”

I spend our journey back trying to make amends, allowing Eliyas to conduct his own interview.

How is his daughter doing in London?

Is she cold?

Does she like her job?

How long until she can come and visit herself?

Before I realise it, we are back at the old house.

As we pull up and make our way back into the courtyard, a little form dressed in a clean white frock and blue trainers comes bursting from the front door.

As Harmeh hurtles awkwardly towards us, I notice that she is carrying Eliyas’ bible again—little white receipts poking out from the behind the yellowed pages.

Eliyas laughs, picking her up and swinging her onto his shoulders.

“Intalako ilaali! Raji Waaqaati!”

“Look at this child! A miracle from God!”