By Jake Cusack and Matthew Tilleard, Inc.com

This is the first in a series of dispatches from a pair of investment advisors who work with growth companies in Afghanistan, South Sudan, Iraq, Haiti, and other countries devastated by war and poverty. The entrepreneurs you will meet in the coming months use tenacity and ingenuity to overcome obstacles both recognizable and unimaginable to their western counterparts.

You can learn a lot about a country on the way over, just by looking around you. Kabul International is among the world’s busiest single-runway airports, and the noon Safi Airways flight is one of eight commercial flights from Dubai to Kabul each day. Crammed into a humid bus, we bump along the tarmac in Dubai and then mount the stairs to the plane.