Never Stop Dreaming

Story by Gail Parsons 
Photography by Leidy Lester

No matter what life throws your way, never lose sight of your dreams.” That conviction is what Jose Rosa lives by and helps others achieve.

After twice beating an aggressive form of cancer, he was determined to keep his business afloat while mentoring and inspiring others. Through Live Like Locals, he helps entrepreneurs overcome the struggles of starting and maintaining their own business while hosting events for the community to enjoy.

Rosa said he started the business because he likes to see people succeed and when they hit the rough spots, he knows what they are going through.

“I know it’s tough,” he said. “Everybody goes through some type of trial, some type of difficulty in life. It’s hard to see people that really want something and they just don’t know how to get it. When people will look at how tough things can be—I’ve been there. I’ve seen some stuff that most people won’t see in an entire lifetime.”

His experiences, rather than bringing him to despair, gave him strength.

Determination

Rosa started life in New York City. Growing up in the Bronx in the 1970s and 80s wasn’t easy but it helped mold a mind set of determination.

“Growing up in New York—it was difficult,” he said. “When I was 14 years old, I got beat up by a gang, on 42nd Street in Times Square during the middle of the day.”

 The attack happened while he was on his way to work. Right after school the young Rosa would take the subway from the Bronx to Manhattan. That day, he learned his first real life lesson.

“That was my first impact with life, and I knew then—life is gonna be tough,” he said.

As a teen, Rosa wasn’t convinced he would live past 20. But he had dreams and determination. When he was 28, it was time to say goodbye to New York and start turning the dreams into reality. Rosa first landed in North Carolina. Eventually moving to Orlando and 18 years ago found Savannah.

When he arrived, he found home. He started meeting people, making connections and growing his graphic and web design company.  He worked with small business owners helping with their marketing, and as technology shifted more to the digital world, so did his business.

The entrepreneurs he worked with, while he was helping them grow their businesses, also became his mentors.

Live Like Locals

In 2017, he started Live Like Locals Savannah and would eventually replicate the model with a focus on Jacksonville, Florida.

“We started Live Like Locals … basically because I was getting tired of trying to explain to people how to use video to build their business,” he said. “So, I said, ‘Let me just do myself’ and Live Like Locals was born.”

With Reneé LaSalle behind the camera Live Like Locals started posting weekly Top Five videos. 

“We did that for three and a half years,” Rosa said. “Every single week we put out a video that was two to three minutes long. She was great on camera and she would just basically tell you what are the top five events that you should attend this week in Savannah.”

Before long, people were contacting him, he was getting press releases from places that wanted him to mention their event and Live Like Locals was going places.

“It was fun,” he said. “But it was more of a journey because it opened up opportunities for me to have more digital marketing work. And then, trying to figure out how Live Like Locals would make money was a little bit different.”

Just as he thought they had it figured out, everything came to a screeching halt when COVID-19 reared its ugly head. As Rosa tried to reinvent his business under the fog of the pandemic, little did he know that the biggest challenge of his life was right around the corner.

The Diagnosis

It started with a cough. It wasn’t COVID. The doctor said it was a cold and gave him antiviral medicine. It lessened the cough but, in a week, it was right back.

“They ran a chest x-ray,” he said.

There was no question, something was terribly wrong, the x-ray showed his lungs were black. However, because of COVID it was six weeks before he could get in to see a pulmonologist. By then his cough had worsened and he was running a constant low-grade fever but when he started coughing up blood, Rosa got scared.

“You see it in the movies and its like, ‘you’re coughing up blood, life is over,’” he said.

The day he finally got in to see the pulmonologist, he was immediately admitted to the hospital for more tests.

“At first they thought I had lung cancer, but I don’t smoke and there was nothing in my family,” he said. “It was scary because that was what everybody was saying they thought I had because my lungs were so messed up and so black.”

As he waited for the biopsy to come back, he thought about the goodbyes he would have to say—stage four lung cancer doesn’t come with a high survival rate.

“When they found out I had Hodgkin’s lymphoma, that was a relief,” he said. “I had one of the doctors look at me and say, ‘If somebody forced you to choose a cancer, this is the one you want to have.”

Armed with the knowledge that he had a better chance for survival than if he had lung cancer, Rosa turned his attention to getting past this hurdle. It turned out the cancer was aggressive. It was all over his lymph nodes, in the chest, the abdomen, and his lungs were filled with it.

“It was everywhere,” he said.

He started chemotherapy and a few months into it the PET scan showed 90% of the cancer was gone. The light at the end of the tunnel shined a little brighter. He finished up the treatment and was ready to get back to living his life. As normal procedure, he went back in for another scan one month after his last treatment.

The results were devastating. Somewhere along the line, the chemo had stopped working. The cancer was back and worse than before.

“It was all over,” he said. “There were masses on my lungs and in areas that I had no cancer before and that was when they realized this was too aggressive, the cancer was just growing. It was a slap to the face because we thought it was over. We thought the fight was done—we had rung the bell.”

A More Aggressive Treatment

As the world was getting used to living with COVID and businesses were reopening, Rosa’s dream shifted from pursuing the growth of Live Like Locals to simply staying alive. Because the chemotherapy didn’t work, the next step was a stem cell transplant.

“What they do is they take your blood out, they clean it and then there’s no cancer in it,” he said.

But it’s not an easy process and includes seven days of chemo. Then the stem cells are reintroduced into the blood stream in the hopes that the body will accept them, and they start duplicating by themselves.

“You have to wait a couple of days until your numbers come back up again,” he said. “The feeling—it feels like they’ve taken all life from you. You’re really weak. I was almost in a comatose state. It was so bad.”

Planning a Future

Rosa’s first cancer diagnosis was in 2021. In May 2023, after two grueling years, he went into remission.

“That was when we started getting back to work,” he said. “That’s when I made plans for Live Like Locals again.”

With a renewed lease on life, Rosa picked up where he left off and is busy setting up pop-up markets around the area and bringing people together to share their cultures, build their businesses and enjoy life.

No matter what is around the next turn, Rosa will continue following his dreams, create new ones and help others reach their goals. It’s the same dream he had before the cancer but now, his outlook is a little different.

“Things kind of changed in the sense of before you think business, you think money,” he said. “A lot of what I’m doing now is helping and encouraging others to do more.”

He has 10 hosts for Live Like Locals Savannah. All of them have a drive to succeed and together they empower each other.

“The trade-off is I’m helping them on the digital marketing side and they help me on the Live Like Local side,” he said.

Exactly what the future holds, Rosa isn’t sure, but he knows if he could be where he is today, anything is possible.

“I find that even at my age of 51, I haven’t stopped dreaming,” he said. “I don’t care if you’re 19 or 50—keep dreaming. Don’t let the dream die.”