What Goes Around Comes Around Bheka Pierce   © Copyright 2025 by Bheka Pierce

Image by wendy CORNIQUET from Pixabay

She, Britta, spoke six languages. I recall a lovely moment a corridor of the junior school when we came across a boy of eight or nine standing in a corner looking scared. Britta asked him siZulu if he were all right. The boy looked entirely astonished to hear this red-headed white woman in this far off country speaking the language of his home. “Oh, my mother,” he answered in that language, “it is only I am not finding my way.” Britta took him by the hand, and they talked of home while she led him to his classroom.

At our high school graduation, we had two special awards: Student of the Year and The International Understanding Award. The second year we were there, we had three students all deserving of both those awards. Britta and I sat at our kitchen table and wrote a citation for The Ambassador at Large Award, to be given to the student the faculty felt would best reflect what our school stood for as he or she entered the wider world.

That year, the award went to a student born in Uganda and adopted by a Danish couple. As it happened, he was not only a fine person, but also an excellent student. Britta encouraged him to apply for Cambridge. He was, at first, reluctant, but Britta kept at him until he did so. Cambridge was happy to have him. To no one’s surprise, he did well there.

When Britta died at the age of fifty-nine, when our children, our students, and I, lost her, I sat at our kitchen table and wrote a fourth award for our school, The Red-Headed League Award, given to the student that the faculty and the student body together felt best lived up to what Britta believed in and stood for. Here is what I came up with:

The Red-Headed League Award

This award honors the memory of Britta Kjær Pierce, who served CIS as teacher, counselor, and IB coordinator from 1982 to 2002. Her diligence in building up and maintaining a successful IB program, her dedication to her students, and her support of her colleagues helped CIS become one of the very best IB schools around the globe. She was in part a red-headed Minerva helping us hear the music of our inner voices; in part a fleet-footed Mercury bearing messages through our corridors; and in part a fiery and fiercely loyal Mars whenever she felt our school or any of our students to be in danger.

To all of us who knew her, Britta was for two decades our school’s warm-hearted and vibrant earth-mother. She knew how to kiss a scraped psyche and make it better. She knew how to listen to and talk with anyone, so that one left her office or a chat on the stairs feeling that the weather inside one’s head had changed and it was going to be a good day after all.

As an international nomad at home in the world, Britta looked past the trappings of nationality, race, age, and gender to see in each of us the essences that join us to the human family. All faces were beautiful to her, and the names belonging to those faces were her poetry. Each day, she greeted students and colleagues with a buoyant, bright-eyed smile that said: you are valuable to me; you are worthy of yourself; and I am confident you will grasp the very best destiny of all that is in you. Her very being said: I feel so lucky to know you. Those of us lucky enough to have known her now carry that blessing in our hearts.

In keeping with her egalitarian embrace of the world, the winner of this award shall be chosen in equal measure by the graduating seniors and their teachers. The winner need not, of course, be red-headed, so long as she or he is red-headed in spirit. Beyond that, this award shall be presented to the graduating senior who best exemplifies those lights Britta lived by:

1. the understanding that all people, regardless of birth or belief, are equal and equally deserving of our common human respect and human regard;

2. the knowledge that the Golden Rule is the garden gate to one’s own happiness, that one’s fullness of being lies both immediately and ultimately in doing unto others as one would have done unto oneself;

3. the realization that through honesty to others and to self one finds freedom;

4. the self-respect to be gained by living according to one’s ideals, even—or especially—when one is at odds with the social norms;

5. the courage to stand up for and champion justice;

6. the commitment to bring the light of education’s shining beacon to everyone;

7. the wisdom to be found from recognizing that not everyone walks at the same pace;

8. the ability to appreciate, celebrate, and enjoy others for who they are;

9. the awareness that humor must be forgiving to be truly funny;

10. the recognition that love generously offered is the mystic gift that returns ten-fold.

In sum, the winner of this award is she or he who is most aware that when one walks the extra mile to help another, one gets to see landscapes that would otherwise be missed. The winner of this award is the one who—like Britta--appreciates that the meaning of life is best found in the grateful giving of one’s heart, energy, and time to help others along the way.

So saying, I am happy to announce that this year’s winner of the Britta Kjær Pierce Red-Headed League Award is:

A footnote: The young man who went to Cambridge and did well there, wrote to me two years ago to let me know he has set an annual bursary in Britta’s name a to cover the costs for a deserving student from Africa for his or her years while at Cambridge. Wherever she is, I am sure Britta is delighted.

I grew up in Arlington, Massachusetts, got a degree in English from Rutgers, went to Swaziland (now Eswatini) in 1970 with the Peace Corps, met my wife there, the daughter of Danish missionaries. We taught there as well as for many years here at the Copenhagen International School and raised two great kids. The piece I’ve attached is nonfiction. It all happened in the order related here. It may sound like fiction, but that’s because whatever I write sounds like fiction. Even my grocery lists sound like fiction.