Makayla Morissette jumps around the schoolyard, her six long pigtails bouncing up and down.
Someone asks her if she's nervous.
"Nope!" she says with confidence.
Are you excited, she's asked.
"Yep!" she says with a huge smile.
The 11-year-old is about to get her hair cut — then shaved.
It's in memory of her grandmother, Gwen Sinding, who died of cancer in August, 2011.
During the summer, Makayla asked her mother, Adriana Brooks, if she could shave her head to raise money for cancer research. She didn't want to simply cut her hair and donate it. She didn't want someone else to shave their hair with her for support. She wanted to donate her hair, then have it shaved down to almost nothing — and she wanted to do it by herself.
On Monday, in front of her schoolmates at Ecole la Verendrye, Makayla proudly sat in a chair and one-by-one, her naturally highlighted, brown-blonde pigtails were snipped off. Every time she held one of the nine-inch bunches of hair up in the air, people cheered.
With her now-short and uneven hair sticking up in all directions, Jean Pothier from B.C. Sheriff Service, took an electric razor to her head to make the first shave.
He was one of 25 cyclists that stopped by the school for the head shave that day along with his Tour de Valley team from Cops for Cancer.
The team will be covering 875 km of road in the Fraser Valley alone over nine days, from Sept. 27 to Oct. 5.
The Tour de Valley team has raised more than $250,000 so far for the Canadian Cancer Society.
For a team of one, Makayla herself has raised a fair bit of money for cancer research. She set a goal of $1,000, and surpassed that on Monday. She has now set a new fundraising goal of $2,500.
Click here to donate to Makayla's fundraiser.
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