I’m Robin (she/her/ค่ะ). Born to U.S. missionaries in Nairobi, I’ve lived overseas my whole life. That accident of geography insulated me from a lot of what you all have been forced to live through recently: collapsing healthcare, dead-end jobs, systems designed to break you. I never had to face it directly. But watching people I love get ground down—holy hell, I feel it.
These days I’m “retired,” which mostly means dog walking, dog feeding, dog negotiating. I could have stayed there, happily buried in fur, wet noses, and kibble. But the opportunity and need to start Defiant hit me in the gut. If the choice is escape or extinction, you either build exits or you watch people burn. I don’t sit well on the sidelines.
My background is management consulting and data ontologies. Translation: I know how to take a messy pile of people, paperwork, and problems and spin it into something navigable. At Defiant I use those skills to connect dots: the right surgeon in Phuket, the right visa agent in Chiang Mai, the right friend-of-a-friend who already survived the same bureaucratic hell, and of course making sure all the Defiant website links work and pages comport with Google Lighthouse standards (as much as we can).
For me, Defiant is empathy with teeth. I may never have been trapped inside the Homeland myself, but I’ve seen what it does. And I’m here because nobody should have to choose between suffering quietly and dying badly—not when the exits are out here, waiting.
