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

"I lost her twenty-four years ago, but she remains in my  heart every second of every day now left to me." Photo courtesy of the author.

In southern Africa, serving in the Peace Corps in Swaziland in the early 1970s, I found the love of my life, a Danish lass, whose outer and inner beauty were joined into one. We married, taught together in a bush school built by her father, took a walking tour up Africa, made it to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro, and eventually settled in Denmark, where we raised two children, and worked together at the Copenhagen International School for twenty years before ALS took her from us.

She, Britta, spoke six languages. I recall a lovely moment in a corridor of the junior school when we came across a boy of eight or nine standing in a corner looking scared. Britta asked in 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, when we had three students equally deserving of 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 from Uganda. 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:

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:

Two footnotes:

1. During the reception after the graduation ceremony, the winner of the award usually finds me to say something along the lines of how honored she or he feels to win the award that everyone hopes to win, and how hard she or he will work to live up to my wife’s example.

2. That young Ugandan who won the award the first year went on to Cambridge and did well there. Five years ago now, he wrote to me to let me know he has established an annual bursary in Britta’s name to cover the costs for a deserving student from Africa for his or her years at Cambridge. Wherever she is, I am sure Britta is delighted.