Think running your small business is difficult? Try running it in Venezuela.

(This post originally appeared on The Washington Post)

It is not easy doing business in Venezuela nowadays. The country is mired in a historic economic collapse and its citizens are finding it difficult to get food, medicines, supplies and spare parts. There is little cash around and whatever is available has lost most of its value due to skyrocketing inflation. With times as hard as they are there you would think that it would be very tough to run a business. It is. But these challenges certainly aren’t stopping some.

For example, Victoria Garcia’s business is still in operation. She’s the owner of a diving school in Chichiriviche de la Costa, a resort village about 43 miles from Caracas where many local entrepreneurs — like her — earn their livelihoods from the tourist trade.

Garcia is dealing with problems that would seem unimaginable to most western small business owners. According to this recent report, her village has no Internet (the signal disappeared from the region last August after cables and transmitters were stolen) and many of her customers have no bank accounts. When payday comes, Garcia must fork over a 15 percent commission to buy a bag full of cash to pay her employees.

In Chichiriviche de la Costa, trust is the number one currency. Merchants and restaurateurs sell products on the promise that customers will return with cash days later after bank transfers are received. Still, business still goes on: Garcia had about 100 customers over a recent weekend and says she’s just “trying to do our best.”

She isn’t the only business owner with these challenges. Other business owners there are learning how to live in a noncash world by bartering and coming up with creative ways to get paid.

One restaurant owner travels more than a mile out to sea four times a day to pick up a faint Internet signal from another town so that she can process credit card transactions. On one such trip she carried with her 13 credit cards to process. She then returned the cards to her customers who waited for her on a beach. Some of her customers are hesitant to give her their PIN numbers. But what choice do they have? And what choice does she have?