My name is Teo, and I live in Georgia 🇬🇪 — a country in the Caucasus region, at the intersection of Eastern Europe and Western Asia — a place where animals are subjected to extreme cruelty, and where celebrations and even casual gatherings often begin with their slaughter.

When I was five years old, I told my family members I was going to build a home for animals one day.

They smiled — the way adults smile at things children say.

But I never forgot it.

Growing up, that dream didn’t fade the way most childhood dreams do. It just got quieter — waiting, the way real things wait. Every animal I saw, every moment that broke my heart, every time I looked at a creature and thought someone should do something — it was all going somewhere. It was all becoming this.

Fourteen years ago, I became vegan. It did not come from theory or gradual change. It came from a moment I could not step away from. I came across a video by accident — an angora rabbit still alive while people were tearing fur from her body. I can still hear the sound. I have never forgotten it.

It was not just something I watched — it was something I felt physically, as if that suffering had nowhere else to go but through me. From that moment on, the way I saw animals changed completely. And the desire to build a sanctuary became something deeper — something that could no longer be ignored or postponed.

Teossa Sanctuary exists because I refused to let it not exist.

Everything here was built with my own hands and funded from my own pocket. There was no grant, no organization behind me, no safety net. Just a dream I had been carrying since I was five, and a complete inability to give up on it.

Doing this in Georgia comes with its own particular kind of loneliness. When your family includes a bull, sheep, or chickens — when their lives depend on proper veterinary care — you are faced with a harsh reality: that level of care barely exists here.

So I carry the weight of that responsibility myself.

And still — I figure it out every time.

Teossa is also something that has never existed here before: the only fully vegan sanctuary in Georgia. Every animal who lives here eats a completely plant-based diet. Every decision made here starts from the same place — that these are lives, not resources. That they feel, that they think, that they matter.

In a country where even street dogs live under constant threat from humans, where suffering is normalized and rarely questioned, I feel a responsibility that goes beyond compassion — it becomes a form of resistance. Resistance against indifference, against cruelty that is accepted as culture, against the idea that some lives matter less than others.

What I am trying to build with Teossa is not just a sanctuary, but a different way of seeing. A place where protection is not exceptional, but the standard. Where animals are not invisible, and where their lives are not negotiable.

This work is not separate from the world it exists in — it is a response to it.

It exists because I refused to look away, and it will continue for as long as I do.