You can come back from anything. Even if your supplier disappears off the map and you are 5,000 miles away, a creative entrepreneur has to be able to patch things together. Here's how I learned this lesson the hard way.

During four years overseas in West Africa, I supported myself through moonlighting, consulting on Google Adwords accounts, and building web sites for clients in the U.S. and Europe. In my third year abroad, a new publishing business I had started on a home visit began to take off at the same time my volunteer responsibilities were picking up. A couple of times a month I'd set my alarm clock to wake up for 3:00 a.m. conference calls by satellite phone, where other participants would marvel at working on location from Los Angeles and London. I never said a word about being even further away in places like Sierra Leone and Liberia.