MARK Lindsay’s belts don’t only hold his pants up at the waist.

They have also held up a roof over his head and kept it there.

“Thirty years me doing this. Thirty years now me selling belt, and I build my house and support my five children. I save my money, buy my land, and build my house in St Mary — and do more thing out of it,” Lindsay, 53, told the Jamaica Observer last Saturday while he sold belts at his stall in Springs Plaza, Half-Way-Tree.

“It’s not what you earn, it’s what you put away — growing up as a youth, my mommy tell me that. I always remembered what my mommy tell me and just do my work, sell my belt, put away what I can put away, throw my partner, buy my land, and build my little house,” he continued.

He recalled pausing on the house for a while, to the point where it got overrun by bushes. When the house was 50 per cent completed he paused for a year to “save up some money”. Soon after, the entrepreneur said he had an awakening.

“You can’t just have $1,000 and spend it like that; you have to spend $500 out of it and go back again. For the year, I saw grass growing in it and I looked into my self and said: ‘No man, I have to get my act together and start it again.’ When I restarted it was non-stop,” Lindsay said.

“When I finished and the carpenter came to put in the roofing and doors and those things, I was in there one Sunday and I feel like a king to know that I did this. A lot of people like me have big job and bigger than what I have but they don’t have what I have,” he added, proudly revealing that his mother and one of his sisters supplied him with furniture after learning that he had built the house.

“My mother and my sisters didn’t know I was building the house so when I was done and told them, they came to St Mary to look at it and my mother couldn’t believe. My mommy and my sister, the two of them furnished the house for me. Up to the bed I am sleeping on right now, my mommy gave me.”

Interestingly, Lindsay didn’t start off with belts. It was the suggestion of another vendor in the Half-Way-Tree vicinity which set things in motion.

“I used to sell brief in packs as well as white merinos but when I used to go downtown [Kingston] to buy them, I used to go to Cross Roads and walk to Half-Way-Tree with them on my hand, looking for sales. So, coming by Springs Plaza before the trees cut down, I used to sit underneath the trees,” he recalled.

“A female who was selling brassiere and panties on the same plaza looked at me and directed me to where I can get some belts — and from I started selling the belts 30 years now, I never stopped.”

He has taken the management of his life-changing business seriously over the years, and would often travel from his home in St Mary to Kingston to make it work.

“The only day I take off the road is a Sunday. I travel from St Mary to Half-Way-Tree every morning. And I go over every night. But I have family living in St Catherine so when I don’t feel like going to my house in the country I just go over by my family and then I’m back on the road in the morning, but that’s just sometimes when I don’t feel like taking that journey,” Lindsay noted.

Lindsay told the Sunday Observer that being a sole trader and selling the belts has been a “pleasure” for him.

“At the age of 53 no one is really going to employ me to work for them right now so I just have to take the belts more serious now. I have children now so I take it more serious than before. From what I earn I can eat and send my youth to school,” he said.

“While starting to sell belts I started to get my kids; five kids. Two live in America and two are in Jamaica that I am sending to school right now. Two are going to high school and one is going to primary school.”

Lindsay added, though, that each day out on the road does not guarantee a sale.

“Most times I come out and go back in at the end of the day without making a dollar. And then you have a time when customer who know that I have been here for years will come and support me, and you will be frighten to see the money that I make,” he told the Sunday Observer.

Unable to give an estimate of how many belts he sells weekly, Lindsay told the Sunday Observer that his clientele is far and wide.

“I have a lot of customers. I have customers who come and support me and tell me they have been buying belts from me since they were young and going to school. I have customers who come and say their mother was carrying them to me to buy belt from they were young; they just don’t leave me. It’s just customer service — that’s why I have them coming around me all the while,” he said.