Bridget, Steve, Jethro, Val, and Simon Hayes.

The Hayes family of Tshwane

On these pages you will find articles about some of the things we are interested in, and links to similar things on other pages. Our interests include art, literature, Christian theology, history, genealogy and a lot more.

There are more than 30 pages here, and we keep adding more, so we hope you will come back again. If you get lost, you can always come back to this home page, or there are index pages that show all our pages in various categories.

The main point of having a Web page is to provide a contact and reference point for friends and family or people with similar interests (who are potential friends), so if anything on these pages interests you, please let us know by signing our guest book or writing to us.

A good way to keep in touch is through electronic Bulletin Board Service (BBS) conferences. BBSs are the way people used to communicate electronically before the Internet was opened up to hoi polloi, and are still (in my view) a better means of many-to-many communication. The most general conference is Worldchat, and you can join it either through the FamilyNet BBS network, or as an Internet e-mail mailing list.

We've lived in or near Pretoria, South Africa, since 1983, but before that we were in KwaZulu/Natal, and we were all born there, and so regard that as home.

Steve retired from the Editorial Department of the University of South Africa at the end of September 1999, and hopes to eke out the rather small pension by freelance editing, writing, teaching and researching.

His e-mail addresses at the university will no longer work, so please see our contact page if you would like to keep in touch. One of his first freelance teaching jobs was teaching mission and missiology at the Resurrection of Christ Orthodox Theological Seminary at Shen Vlash-Durres, Albania.

[See our family page for more details ]

Steve ordained as a deacon
Stephen Hayes was ordained as a deacon by His Eminence Metropolitan Seraphim, Orthodox Archbishop of Johannesburg and Pretoria, at the Orthodox Cathedral of the Annunciation, Pretoria, on 25 July 2004.

Jethro completed his training
Jethro completed his training as a vehicle mechanic with the Tshwane Municipality, and in June 2003 started work with a truck distrbuting firm. At the beginning of 2004 he began working with a Toyota distriutor in Brooklyn, Pretoria, thus fulfilling an ambition he has had since he was 9 years old.

Simon graduates
Simon graduated with both a degree (BTech) and Diploma in fine arts in April 2003. He continues to work at Exclusive Books in Menlyn, Pretoria.

Blue Press No 19 - December 2000
We have just sent out our family newsletter, Blue Press No 19, which has family news from 1997-2002.

We have sent out an electronic version as PDF files to people whose e-mail addresses we have. We have sent a condensed version by snail-mail to those who don't have e-mail addresses, or whose e-mail addreses we don't know. You can also see it on a web page here.

Bridget Hayes in Athens
After five years of study at Athens University, Bridget returned home in June 2002. But, because of a strike of university lecturers, he had one more exam before she could get her degree. During the long vac she helped with catechetical amd mission work in Mamelodi, Soshanguve and Winterveld, especially training a youth choir.

In September she returned to Athens for her last exam. For a change she went by British Airways instead of Olympic Airways because they offered a special student fare. That was a bad mistake - BA wouldn't let her on the plane to Athens, and she was stranded in London with no money. Eventually she reached Greece, and completed her last exam. While waiting she stayed at monasteries and with friends. She finally graduated in December 2002, and returned home in January. She now spends most of her time painting ikons. She is hoping to return to Greece for postgraduate studies in theology.

Rescuing the memory of our peoples
In September Steve went to a conference in Rome on church and mission history in Africa, Asia and Latin America, attended by archivists, missiologists and church historians from over 20 countries. Steve read a paper at the conference on the Database of African Independent Churches and African Church leaders, a project he has been working on for the last 12 years.

Political memoirs
Steve has been writing a few pages of political memoirs. There seemed to be very little information on the web about the role of the Liberal Party in the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, and so until someone writes a more comprehensive account, here is some information. There is also a little on the church struggle in Namibia. Not much yet, but I'll be adding to it, and I hope others who were involved in these events will contribute.

We've added some new pages. Simon has put some of his art on display, and Steve has added a couple of pages of the past, as memoirs of a sort. There is the trolley bus page, when he was a bus driver in Johannesburg, and a reproduction of part of the Last Pink Press -- the newsletter Steve and Dave de Beer sent out when they were deported from Namibia in 1972. This one is better than the original, though, as it is illustrated with photographs.

Yahoo/Geocities, which hosts these pages, has changed the format of its guest book, which we only discovered a couple of months after it stopped working, and it's taking some time to update pages to the new format.