By Stephanie Hanes

As soon as I slipped into the greenish-blue water, into the enclosure the boat crew simply called "the cage," I realized I couldn't breathe.

It was the cold, I thought. There hadn't been any wet suits my size, so I was wearing one that was too big, without a hood, and the chilly ocean water circulated around my body, mocking any concept of insulation. With one hand, I clutched the iron grab bar in the cage – a safe place to hold on, our guide had told us – and I gulped for air, tasting briny seawater instead.

Then I heard marine biologist Michael Scholl yell at the four of us floating in the cage. "Go down!" That was our cue, he had told us before we got on the boat that morning. It meant we were supposed to hold our breath, duck underwater, and look through our goggles; it meant that a great white shark was swimming nearby.

This, of course, was the point of cage diving with sharks – an increasingly popular adventure in waters near Cape Town, South Africa.

I was already shivering, but didn't know what else to do. I went under.

The shark cage is about three feet wide, and more than six feet high. It is tied to the side of the boat “Shark Fever” and to a number of buoys that keep it floating – so about a foot of the cage is above water. It has a barred lid that is closed as soon as the divers are in the cage – a safety measure, Mr. Scholl told us, to keep a great white from gliding in with us.

(I checked the bars – wide enough to squeeze through if the cage, for some reason, sank. But which would be better, I wondered, drowning in a sinking cage or getting eaten by a shark?)

The water looked brownish and dusty from below the surface. But within seconds, a huge mass of grayish-white flesh was in front of me – no more than inches away. It was ghostlike, floating, its humongous mouth slack-jawed, its dark eye no more than inches from mine.

It was more awesome than scary. The creature seemed so calm; its path through the water cradle-rocking smooth. I could start to understand why some people might be tempted to reach out and stroke it – something that Scholl had warned us was the No. 1 violation of cage diving. It sounded stupid at the time. No touching the great white sharks through the cage, he’d told us. The group of tourists started to laugh.

“No. Seriously,” he said, some people have tried to touch the sharks. "We will cancel the dive for everybody else on the boat and head back to shore.... Those sharks are by far not as dangerous as most people believe but they are still very powerful animals; they might hurt you without intending to."

One swipe of a powerful fin and your arm could shatter, he added.

I had no real desire to touch the shark. But at that first sighting, I also wasn't as frightened as I thought I'd be.

Then, with a wave of panic, I became convinced that my frozen legs were floating uncontrollably through the bars of the cage. I tried to pull my feet closer to my body, and felt like I was flailing. I shot up through the surface and tried to get air.  Not much came in, and I felt my teeth clacking against each other.

"Go down!"

I ducked again, trying to keep track of my bobbing limbs. This time, the shark came toward us ferociously, mouth open, lunging, a rocket with jagged teeth in full display. It was going for a piece of bait the crew had tossed into the water, which was attached to a rope so the thrower could retract it before the shark got it. But the shark might as well have been coming for us. It exploded through the water, an inch from the cage – an inch from me.

The wave shook the cage, and I recoiled into the Italian tourist next to me. I was shivering harder now. As I pushed my head above the surface, I heard one of the crewmembers joke that I was turning a new shade of blue.

"Go down!"

Again, underwater, I see near me the shark, this creature that doesn't survive long in captivity, that is still a mystery to most scientists, that is revered and feared and honored. It is quiet. I have the sense that it is only the shark and I, looking at each other, and I am acutely aware that I am the creature out of place.

Out of breath, I shoot up again to the surface.

By Scott Baldauf

Staff Writer

If you can imagine a musical about a human rights tribunal, complete with details of gruesome torture, where the lines between innocence and guilt remains blurry, then you have a pretty good idea of the play I saw in Johannesburg, South Africa, the other night.

"Truth in Translation" is about the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a monumental attempt to bring closure to the apartheid era, with all its horrible murders and crimes on both sides, without putting South Africa into a downward spiral of vendettas and violence.

As an American reporter who has just arrived here, I hoped this would be both an excellent entree into the South African arts scene, and a primer on its recent politics. It would have been so if I had known a bit more Zulu. And Xhosa. And Afrikaans. Even the bits of English went by so fast, in that machine-gun South African style, that I'm not even that sure I understood the quarter that I did understand.

Yet, after living in India for five years, I'm used to linguistic vacuums. And there are things that you pick up even without knowing the language.

For one thing, as I watched audience members convulse with laughter as actors mimicked top South African politicians, or shrink with horror as the cast acted out sadistic torture techniques on stage, it became clear to me that South Africa was a place where many of the wounds have just begun to heal.

But it was the easy joking banter among the characters on stage – black and white, English and Afrikaner, Zulu and Xhosa and “Colored” – that somehow reminded me of another post-conflict zone far away in Afghanistan.

In the early days after the Taliban fled, I shared a house with several other reporters in the pricey neighborhood of Wazir Akbar Khan. Our translators would clown around and hang out, having tea in the staff quarters, and to all outward appearances, their easy relations were a sign that Afghanistan was heading inevitably toward peace. There were Pashtuns and Tajiks, city boys and country bumpkins, Sunni and Shiites, and they all clowned around, played badminton in the garden, and acted like bosom buddies.

Until one day, when the cook, a grizzled Tajik everyone called Uncle Qudrat, declared that he didn't trust my driver, a Pashtun, because he had once been a member of a radical Islamic party called Hizb-I Islami. "I'm afraid he might poison the food," said Qudrat darkly. Immediately, Farsi-speakers sided up with the cook, while Pashto-speakers sided with my driver, and the rift hardened. Within weeks, I moved out, unwilling to fire a man who had saved my skin many times. In a conflict zone where the past is not that distant, bloodlines, language, and culture seemed to trump mere friendship everytime.

Likewise, in "Truth in Translation," it's frighteningly clear how quickly chummy relations turn into something much more violent. Push a character a bit too hard, and he'll come back with surprising ferocity. Soothing moments swiftly follow, often accompanied by the lilting jazz of Hugh Masekela, the jazz trumpeter best known outside South Africa for composing the song, "Free Nelson Mandela."  Tempers can flare, but they also fade. Fatigue keeps South Africa from explosion.

It would take a madman, or an American sit-com director, to turn a controversial and plodding human rights tribunal into a musical drama. In the case of "Truth in Translation" it took Michael Lessac, who lists "Taxi," "The Drew Carey Show," "Just Shoot Me," and "Everyone Loves Raymond" as past directorial credits.

The story is driven by the reactions of the translators who bear the burden of translating the tribunal into all the country's major languages, following word for word some of the darkest moments in African history. As intelligence chiefs, ANC rebels, and top politicians admit to heinous crimes, or get off scot-free, it's inevitable for everyone – characters and audience members – to take sides.

Whenever there is a particularly gruesome bit of testimony (translated of course into Zulu, Afrikaans, Xhosa, et al), the cast breaks into song, repeating the testimony word for word. With Masekela composing the tunes, it feels jazzy and upbeat, but it's hard to imagine humming along to vivid lyrics about war-time atrocities while making the evening pasta.

"Truth in Translation" has already made its first run out of South Africa, debuting in the Rwandan capital of Kigali, where audience members broke into spontaneous discussion groups to talk about their own genocide of 1994 when members of the Hutu majority began a killing rampage of the Tutsi minority. The director, Michael Lessac, also talks about creating a documentary about the play, and taking the show to "other countries in conflict transition."

It’s 3 a.m. and we’ve been driving since 5 p.m., pounding, slipping, and splashing through rural Liberia on what have to be some of the worst roads known to man.

It’s the last bit of the rainy season, and many roads are impassable, even to the newest 4-wheel drive vehicles. Yet, I’m with five others in a rickety 1980s Land Cruiser that belches exhaust into the cabin and has more sketchy noises than Click and Clack from “Car Talk” would know what to do with.

But, I need to get back to the capital, Monrovia, to make my flight out of the country, and, thanks to a rain storm that forced the UN to cancel a scheduled chopper flight, this was the only option. So here we are.

I have to give it up for the driver. Every time he plunges the truck into a mini-lake in the middle of the road, putting out the headlights temporarily, and every time we putter diagonally uphill through 6-foot muddy ruts or slide sideways downhill, I think, “This is it. We’re going to get stuck, and there’s no one coming for us. It’s the middle of nowhere. I won’t make my flight out of the country.” After all, I’d been stuck three times already in the three weeks I’d been in Liberia, and I hadn’t yet seen any roads nearly this bad.

And then there were the makeshift bridges. Barely the width of the vehicle, they didn’t look like they could hold a wheelbarrow, much less a truck with six people. We’d made it over a few, but when the right rear wheel busted through the plank wood fifteen feet above a small river, I wondered if I’d ever make it back.

As I shook my head, the driver calmly said something in Mandingo (one of the local languages) to his assistant in the back, who quickly clambered up to the side of the truck to help rock it back and forth until we could get to the shore on the other side.

After hours of this, I stopped being nervous and started enjoying it.

Then, all of a sudden, the mud ruts gave way to a smoother, reddish-brown surface that broadened out to the girth of an American highway.

“Mack trucks,” said the driver, anticipating my question. “The US timber companies brought Mack trucks up to here when they were operating.”  Aha. No wonder I hadn’t seen roads like this anywhere else in the country’s rural southeast. Shows what a little foreign investment can do, I thought.

But, thanks to UN sanctions on timber exports since 2003 after former leader Charles Taylor had taken over the timber industry to fund his brutal war against rebels, no foreign companies had been operating here full-scale for a while.

There were no Mack trucks here now, and even these wider, smoother roads were deteriorating. But, despite the UN sanctions, there were other weaker trucks, weighed down with way more logs than it looked safe to carry, puttering up the muddy hills past UN check points manned by sleepy Ethiopian soldiers. And there were long stretches of road, lined with large piles of plank wood and felled trees. This is what the environmental activists were warning about, I thought: Widespread logging, without active regulation.

The UN and the government say they allow small-scale timber operations as long as it is only distributed within the country. It’s needed for reconstruction after decades of instability and war, they say.

Reconstruction could go faster if the sanctions against timber exports are lifted (see story) and the Mack trucks once again ply these roads. But the country will also have to balance the protection of one of the largest remaining blocks of virgin rainforest in Africa. That could be as tricky a maneuver as anything my driver pulled off on the road to Monrovia.

By Claire Soares, Correspondent

ST. LOUIS, Senegal – If it weren't for the men in boubous, you might think you were in New Orleans. The same snatches of jazz waft among the wrought-iron railings and wooden balconies, but this is the jazz capital of Africa, not America.

Here, the dress code is not black turtlenecks but colorful long robes (boubous); the tipple is a Coca-Cola rather than a martini. Banished are the conventional jazz connoisseurs studiously stroking their beards; at tonight's gig, the fans are more likely to be drumming along on their plastic chairs.

Now in its fourteenth year, the St. Louis festival has attracted some of jazz's biggest names, from Herbie Hancock to Roy Haynes. Inheriting the 'star attraction' mantle this year is American saxophonist Jessie Davis. "It's my first time in Africa," he bellows to the crowd, sat under a starry sky in the town's main square.

It is a motivation that crops up in Senegal's St. Louis year after year. While European artists tend to relish escaping the stuffiness that characterizes the jazz scene back home, for many of the American musicians, it is an opportunity to discover their roots.

"It does my heart good to come to a place and see people that look like me, like my cousins and like Leroy down the street," Davis tells me backstage, sweat dripping off his face after a mammoth two-hour set.

"I'm from New Orleans originally and it's very similar to the vibe there," says the saxophonist, who has played with Milt Jackson and Wynton Marsalis. "It's been a wonderful revelation. I have anticipated this trip my whole life."

It is just not an ethnic retracing of steps, but a musical one too. The clash of African rhythms and European instruments on the clean slate that was the United States is often said to have given birth to jazz.

Africa's musical traditions are as strong as ever. Wander around the center of St. Louis on any given day and you'll see young girls dancing to a tune in their heads, mothers singing to their babies, and guys on street corners banging out a rhythm on their drums – a big djembe wedged between their legs or a small tama tucked under an arm.

Each night during the jazz festival, local musicians pack into backstreet bars and play alongside visiting musicians. These unscripted jam sessions, a rarity in the rest of the world, often trump anything on the official program. With untrained raw talent mixing with schooled professionals, anything goes and it usually goes until the sun comes up.

Organizers say the jazz festival draws up to 60,000 people from around Africa, Europe, and the United States, and it certainly provides the annual moment in the spotlight for the town, France's first settlement in Africa.

Newcomers – whether musicians or music lovers – revel in the photogenic faded pastels of the colonial buildings that line the island city centre and marvel at the bridge linking it to the mainland that was built by Gustav Eiffel, of the tower in Paris fame.

But the picture postcard world of the jazz festival – its root-seeking musicians and pleasure-seeking tourists – is shattered just a few hundred meters from the main stage.

Walk across another less famous bridge on the other side of the island, and you set foot on a thin peninsula, the last land barrier before the Atlantic Ocean. The bridge, built by an anonymous designer and now a mass of twisted rusting metal, splintered planks, and gaping holes, feels more like an obstacle course (although clearly not to the Senegalese egg vendor who sped across effortlessly in front of me).

On the peninsula's white sand beach, a woman washes her vegetables in the waves while a dead dolphin decomposes in the sun. Occasionally casting their eyes gloomily at the trawler silhouettes that dot the horizon, local fisherman complain about depleting fish stocks as they lug their brightly-colored pirogue boats up the sand and offload a disappointing day's catch.

By night, the traditional pirogue vessels play another, more sinister, role. They leave on a clandestine sea voyage, packed with young men, hoping to break into Fortress Europe, hoping for the chance to earn a decent wage even if it means doing menial jobs and living in squalid conditions. Thousands have perished en route, either getting lost, running out of food, or drowning when their boats capsize.

Musicians like Jessie Davis, whose forbears were shipped off the continent as slaves, may get a buzz from coming back to their ancestral land, but such sentiments are largely irrelevant to the current day inhabitants. For many St. Louis youngsters, the idea of tough labor overseas is a lifeline to which they aspire. And jazz? Jazz is just a once-a-year interlude.

By Stephanie Hanes

I spent four years covering courts in the United States. Federal and local, rural and urban, murder cases and white collar crimes. And not once did spectators at a trial ever break into song.

But now I am in South Africa, my first time in a courtroom for 18 months, notebook open and waiting for the verdict in the rape trial of Jacob Zuma, the country’s former deputy president. The crowds outside are growing into the thousands, although we can’t hear them in courtroom 4E. We are waiting for the judge and the lawyers – something you do a lot when you cover courts. It felt familiar.

Then the singing started. First, it was a woman in the back row, her voice piercing and sweet, those first notes of an African tune you know will make you want to get up and sway. I tensed up. You do that when you think there might be a crazy person in the room.

But then more voices joined in. And more. Soon the whole courtroom was singing in perfect harmony – bass, baritone, alto, soprano, all somehow knowing their parts, weaving in and out of each other. A woman ululated. Then a man stood up, and a woman, and another, and all of a sudden the courtroom was dancing. It was totally impromptu, as if out of some musical, “The Trial of Jacob Zuma; Score by Andrew Lloyd Webber.” Except Webber never made music like this, music that breaths struggle and joy and sadness at once.

What are they singing? I whispered to a South African journalist.

They are singing for Zuma, she said. It is a church song – “Jesus’ heart is pleasant.” But they’ve changed the word “Jesus” to “Zuma.”

Outside, there was more singing. Car stereos blasted anti-apartheid struggle songs, and men and women clapped and danced the toyi-toyi – a stomping-type protest dance that brings peoples’ bodies and voices together in one defiant, beautiful movement. In a corner, behind a police line, a collection of a few dozen women’s rights activists supporting the alleged victim – men and women – sang their own protest, as if trying to bolster themselves against the throngs of Zuma loyalists across the street.

For a moment I stopped wondering about Zuma, a politician who has been tainted by corruption scandals, a man who testified that he knew a family friend wanted sex because she wore a skirt to his house. I let my mind go, allowing myself to be simply amazed by this country of sound and struggle.

Momentarily, the lawyers walked into the courtroom. The spectators quieted, and sat. Then the judge came in and began reading his verdict – a process that would take about six hours, with multiple statute citations and explorations of legal terms such as “relevancy.” This, I thought, was more like it.

"I'm the chief here, and I could have you arrested."

Those were the first words I heard from Ugandan media official Robert Kabushenga in the predawn darkness of his building's parking lot.

I was part of a group of journalists gathering to trek to President Yoweri Museveni's rural retreat – a four-hour ride from the capital.

Mr. Kabushenga's intro was probably meant as jocular and funny. But it was a strange way for him introduce himself to the foreign press.

Several hours later, though, when Mr. Museveni greeted the journalists by calling us "rumormongers," I could see the antipathy toward the press came from the top.

People here worry the government is becoming increasingly militarized – and unfriendly to the press, which traditionally has been relatively free here, despite occasional harassment.

Because I don't live in Uganda permanently, it's hard to tell how true that is. But, if this reporting trip is any indication, the government does seem to be growing more wary of an increasingly critical press.

Much of this material appears in the Reporters on the Job feature in the Feb. 23 issue of The Christian Science Monitor.

There’s a tradition around Africa that when people get their pictures taken, they stare stone-faced into the camera.

To an American eye it looks so severe and dour. My hunch is that it’s because there aren't all that many personal cameras on the continent. Most photos here are taken for formal portraits, passport pictures, ID badges, etc. That's in contrast to the US, where most photos are informal snapshots taken with the millions of cameras that Americans own.

But it hasn’t always been that way. Think of the black-and-white portraits from the 19th century of people like Abraham Lincoln. They're all stone-faced and serious. Back then, picture-taking was a new and rare technology. Having your portrait done was a serious event. No smiles, please.

Well, it’s the same today in Africa. I may be chatting amiably with some person who’s laughing and smiling, but the minute I take out my camera, they get all serious.

So I’ve taken to telling people here about the American habit of saying "cheese" before a picture is taken. They, understandably, think this is quite strange – and begin smiling and laughing at this odd American custom. And that’s exactly what I want. They’re back to their smiling selves. And I get the picture that, to American eyes, looks natural.

Blake Lambert – Correspondent

A percussive chant filled my ears as I edged toward the swarm of Ugandans on Kampala Road, the unavoidable path of all political demonstrations in Uganda's capital, Kampala.

"Besigye, candidate," they jubilantly shouted and danced.

A few ecstatic souls even laid a poster of Kizza Besigye, presidential candidate for the opposition Forum for Democratic Change (FDC), on the not-so-clean street and kissed it.

Dozens of police, including some in riot gear, and red-capped military police eyed the crowd suspiciously.

After weeks of legal wrangling between civilian and military courts since his Nov. 14 arrest for treason, Mr. Besigye, who presents the most credible challenge to President Yoweri Museveni in the Feb. 23 presidential election, had gained his freedom on bail.

Thousands of Ugandans wanted to show Besigye their support.

"If we didn't love Besigye, we wouldn't even be here," John Bosco Omara, a self-employed printer.

He complained about too much corruption, sectarianism, poverty, and Museveni's failure to stop the Lord's Resistance Army, a brutal rebel group in northern Uganda.

The riot squad stood maybe 15 feet from where we talked.

A few minutes earlier, I watched one of its members threaten someone who was handing out water to demonstrators who had been tear-gassed so they could wash their eyes.

"You give them more water. You will see what will happen," the policeman snapped.

That blue-tinged tear gas, fired from a mobile cannon, carries a fierce sting, far worse than any variety I'd encountered before in Kampala.

I too needed water to clear my eyes.

Oddly, getting hosed down by the water cannon, as also happened to demonstrators and observers, seemed, to me, to be more benign.

As I walked along the street with Ugandan colleagues, I saw a military policeman use a wooden baton to beat a demonstrator.

It all seemed a bit harsh given that the celebratory crowd didn't appear to pose a threat to anyone either.

At one point, I swiveled my head and watched endless waves of people moving along Kampala Road.

Even when Besigye finally emerged from the High Court sitting atop a car and flashing his two-fingered victory salute, supporters wanted to follow their man back to FDC headquarters.

From 1986 to 1996, one of them told me, crowds of this size would meet Museveni wherever he went and whomever he was with.

A decade later, a growing number of Ugandans wonder why their president doesn't seem ready to emulate his colleagues in East Africa and leave power peacefully, as Benjamin Mkapa of Tanzania has done.

No amount of tear gas or water can erase the doubts about Museveni, but using them often seems to increase public anger.

"Museveni says he has democracy," Julius Otema, an electrician, remarked. "What kind of democracy is this?"

Many Ugandans and Western countries, which have lavished aid on Museveni's government, seem to be asking themselves the same question.

And, if Britain's decision last month to cut $26.5 million in aid to Uganda due to concerns over Besigye's arrest is any indication, some donor countries may have decided the answer.

Stephanie Hanes - Correspondent

It is easy to get lost in Stone Town. The narrow streets twist into dead ends and curl into Arabian courtyards; darkened alleyways open onto chaotic, pungent markets.

It is almost impossible, as a visitor, to know where you are at any given moment. You can see only forward and back. Peripheral vision, and any sense of direction, is blocked by the whitewashed 19th century buildings that rise escarpment-like from the streets.

But that's OK. It is part of the fun to go adrift in this old section of Zanzibar Town, the capital of Zanzibar, a cluster of islands off the Tanzanian coast.

As I wandered on a recent visit, women floated by in their colorful head scarves while men on scooters honked through pedestrians. Children ran past me – not the sad, begging children of some African capitals, but children at play, pushing tires with sticks or catching each other in tag.

I'd turn onto any labyrinthine street, and would find stalls of spices and cloth, or darkened shops filled with traditional Zanzibar chests, or a particularly spectacular wooden door, intricately carved with flowers and vines and dotted with brass studs from India.

Or I'd find a pile of rubble.

Stone Town was once the center of East Africa's spice and slave trade, a place where Indian merchants and Swahili kings and Omani sultans all lived, prospered, and fought. But much of the physical history that gives the city its magic – the lacy Indian balconies and hefty Arabian doors, the hidden interior courtyards and built-in stone benches – is in danger of falling apart.

Without constant upkeep, the limestone plaster over the coral-rock walls turns black and crumbles. The walls themselves are weak, and ceilings held up by rotting mangrove beams are sagging. Every now and then, a house will simply collapse, leaving a lot-sized pile of rubble to bake under the brutal sun. 

After the 1964 revolution, which overthrew the last of the sultans and combined Zanzibar with mainland Tanganyika to form Tanzania, the socialist government gave many of Stone Town's houses to groups of impoverished families. Many of these residents have not been able to afford upkeep – others have not bothered.

One day, my husband and I took a tour of sorts from Mahmud Shivji, who runs a Zanzibar preservation project for the Aga Khan, the spiritual leader of the Ismaili branch of Islam. The Aga Khan has long supported Islamic cultural preservation around the world.

Walking through the heat of midday, Mr. Shivji pointed out a once-majestic building that had collapsed next to a mosque, and another he said was failing. He seemed weary. His organization has renovated some houses, he said, as well as the building that now houses the posh Serena Inn, but there are always more crumbling.

The manager of our hotel, a renovated fairy-tale palace, was also glum about his city's prospects. He later told my husband he feared that in 50 years, a quarter of Stone Town's buildings could be gone.

That night, as the sun set over the Indian Ocean, the warm, pastel light hid the wounds on the 150-year-old buildings. Children's chanting from a Hindu temple mixed with the Muslim calls to prayer. A blessedly cool breeze blew from the harbor where boat lights were starting to twinkle, and through the darkening maze of streets.

The city seemed too vibrant to be threatened, I thought, too much a product of its past to let its history disappear.

I hoped Shivji and the hotel manager were wrong. As the final orange glow turned into darkness, I hoped the men on motorbikes and the women under their veils cared about moving Stone Town into the future without letting its past crumble away.

Some people assume there's not much business activity in Africa – given the number of wars, famines, and other crises. But I've met loads of spirited entrepreneurs across the continent. There was the former prostitute in the slums of Uganda's capital who was trying to start a hair salon to replace the income she lost when she pledged to give up turning tricks.

There's the former bank messenger who has created a thriving company that gives tours of Soweto, the black urban areas of Johannesburg, South Africa.

There are even the middle-schoolers who love learning about the basics of business.

My wife is getting her MBA here in South Africa, and one of her professors recently offered a business-oriented tour of the township. I asked if I could tag along. Clambering into one of the ubiquitous Toyota vans that serve as taxis, mostly for black commuters, we set off.

Here are a couple of the places we visited:

* A day-care center that uses income from its customers to fund, on a shoestring, an orphanage for babies with AIDS. The director is worried the electricity company is going to turn off their power. My wife's classmates pledged to try to help.

* A BMW repair shop where the owner takes smashed-up BMWs, repairs them, and sells them to aspiring township residents for half the dealer price.

It may be harder to start a business in Africa – given all the obstacles – but for many people it's the only way they can make a living. So they're working hard to create and sustain businesses. Maybe even Donald Trump would be impressed.