Kathleen having birthday fun at Lake Tahoe, June 11th, 2025
I constantly invite people to explore our neighborhoods.
By Greg Wong | Examiner staff writer
May 29, 2025 Updated May 29, 2025
Brian Rashid’s “Love Letters to the World” campaign uses short films and interactive art to tell stories of hope, possibilities and positive contributions for cities and communities.
Brian Rashid was at the tail end of a relatively routine trip to Montevideo, Uruguay, on March 16, 2020.
The capital city lies at the southern tip of the small South American country, 8,500 miles from Rashid’s New York City home, where he was scheduled to give a guest lecture at Fordham University’s business school two days later.
But the appearance was canceled. Rashid wasn’t going to make it anyway.
On that Monday morning, he got an email from the Uruguayan state department which read that all flights out of the country had been grounded in an effort to mitigate the spread of COVID-19.
In other words, Rashid was stuck in Uruguay indefinitely.
“That was a really wild time,” he recalled.
It ended up leading to eight months of uncertainty, self-reflection, 5 a.m. swims in the depths of the Atlantic Ocean and one viral online letter that altered the course of his life.
That accidental extended stay in Uruguay is what brought Rashid to San Francisco some five years later. He’s been in town since February working on the latest — but maybe the most personally meaningful and thorough — edition of his “Love Letters to the World” multimedia series.
Entrepreneur using ‘Love Letters’ to tell one of SF's greatest stories
Greg