By Kenicia Francis
Caletia Clarke owns her own shop on Kentish Road, Caletia’s Hair Salon, where she offers a wide range of services and sells authentic Jamaican sandals.
She told Observer, “I love my customers, they’re like my family. Over the years the love from me to them and them to me has been awesome. It has never been about the money or anything, just the love for my customers.”
Clarke first developed a passion for doing hair by braiding her own and various family and friends’ hair for school around the age of 13 in Jamaica.
“I actually just tried. I would see stuff and try and fail, and try again. Each time you do it you keep getting better and better. I would challenge myself and try my best with the little I had,” she said of the experience.
After she had to drop out of school due to becoming a young mother, she began focussing on learning more about the trade.
“I got pregnant at a tender age so I started working; I knew I had to go to work because I had a child to look after,” she said.
A woman in her parish took her in and taught her more techniques like how to dye and perm hair.
While working with the woman as a hairdresser, she began observing the nail technicians in the salon, and fell in love with their processes and creations.
Sometime after, she marketed her skills around her village as an independent hairdresser and manicurist.
When she was 23, her aunt asked her to move to Antigua to help her look after her daughter.
“At the time, she asked me to come up and babysit her daughter. I didn’t see it as just babysitting. I took the opportunity to branch out,” she recalled.
Clarke started doing house calls for her neighbours to braid their hair and do manicures and pedicures while doing odd jobs around town and babysitting for her aunt.
She explained: “In the day I would do house calls and, in the night, I would work as a security in Holberton Hospital from 3 to 11 pm.”
She also spoke about her first shop. “I didn’t choose Gray’s Farm, Gray’s Farm chose me. There was a particular lady who loved my services, and she helped me find my first shop, which was in Gray’s Farm.”
The shop they found was an old salon that she cleaned and renovated before relocating to her new shop on Kentish Road with her husband and son.
She now employs young girls from Gray’s Farm and surrounding areas so they can get work and gain professional experience.
One thing she wishes for all young people to do is, “get your education. Learn as much as you can before being a parent so you can give your kid what you or your family never had growing up. Things are getting more expensive and are changing more and more every day, so get your education and get a skill or trade.”
