Friday, January 22, 2016

The fortune on your head

The fortune on your head sounds like a bounty hunter ad, but it's not. It's about how precious something as your hair can be to somebody who lost it. I donated a lot of things in my life: time, money, clothes, food, ideas...but never hair. And I haven't even thought about that possibility to be frank....who would want my hair?! It's not like I'm Goldylocks (the character, not the principle) and my hair would actually be a treasure.

But, I have been proved wrong...and so the bravest thing I did this week was to cut 20 cm from my hair. I have to mention that it took me about 3 years to grow them, so yeah, it wasn't necessarily an easy decision to make...I thought, until they were actually cut, and I never felt better.

In my do-gooder research, I learnt about this organisation that makes wigs from donated hair, for women who survived cancer. This program started in November 2015, and already a lot of women chose to be part of it. Natural hair wigs are very expensive and difficult to manufacture, so most cancer survivors cannot afford them. Still, losing hair is one of the most traumatic side effects of cancer treatment, and though it might be ignored, because people usually think about the big picture rather than the details in it, a natural hair wig raises confidence and improves the mental state of a survivor.

How it works, is that you go to one of their partner hairdressers and get a 20 cm hair cut for free...or if you live abroad or in other cities, you just go to a regular salon ask them to cut your ponytail, put it in an envelope/ box and send it to the organisation's address (Fundatiei Renasterea: str Virgil Plesoianu, nr 87, sector 1, Bucuresti, Romania). It doesn't matter if your hair is natural or colored.

To make a short hair wig costs about 200 euros, while a long hair one is about 330 euros. So don't be shy on donating money as well.

If you know women who survived cancer, and are struggling with hair loss, please tell them to contact Fundatia Renasterea and enter this program. It will surely help them improve the quality of their life.