a couple of weeks back - i decided to take out my whole family to the animal orphanage - my son is about 3.5 years old and I reckoned he would get quite excited about seeing all these large animals which he had seen only in photos or as drawing in cartoons and books. so we went to KWS and took paid then went in. What stood out was just how many domestic tourists were there. It was a huge number since we had to queue for a couple of minutes to pay. I did not see a white face in sight. As soon as we went in I noticed people of somali extraction also being quite present. We went around and we came to the monkey cage/place where i found a couple of people feeding the monkeys and posing for photos! it struck me as odd since from the first time I did my first national park visit I remember the instructions DON'T FEED THE ANIMALS. Why were these people doing this? did they not read? do they not know that they could be harming the animal? It struck me as odd. Last saturday, I decided to take out the famo to the Safari walk. It has always been a favourite place to visit ever since i brought myself to Nairobi. I was there when rangers was open, then it closed then it opened again... but the last time I was there was possibly 2 years ago. I decided it would be a nice place to take a visitor to the country 'ajionee wanyama'. first stop... Rangers Restaurant - shock on me... it closed... I looked like an idiot - but I guess i could have googled before that. so we decide to eat at that small restaurants next to the safari walk gate and it had terrible service! from taking orders to getting food wrong and late to a number of small small issues here and there. I took it in stride since 'TIA' and went into the safari walk... kujionea wanyama and I noticed things were a bit run down... the water is not clear... not sure even if the fish that were in there are alive. People were as usual feeding animals and taking photos/selfies. I went to the boardwalk and huge section of it was closed off (it was creaky the last time I was there). I looked down an saw lots and lots of litter... majuala all over... I was to take my son to the small boys room and found it locked and decided liweliwalo - we shall use the ladies. all this time something was running at the back of my head .. the question... what happened? this was usually a nice place to visit... now we have lots of people around, the facilities are terrible, they seemed not to be well maintained? what happened? so later that evening as I was pondering on the 'decay' a number of thoughts crossed my mind... could it be that we don't have that many foreign tourists so... we don't need to keep the standard i was used to? did Julius Kipngetich's leaving have anything to do with the terrible state of affairs I had witnessed? THEN IT SUDDENLY HIT ME! I was 'old' and if my son was of age I would tell him - 'you know during my days...x and y and z were fine. e.t.c. And it made me relate to my folks complaining about how education these days is useless/not hard, how carey francis and his maths did blah blah blah. how university education is useless these days and 'quality' has gone down e.t.c. It hit me that if the past is anything to go by the situation will never be 'better'! what we consider decay or may seem like decay from the experienced eyes will always occur as we add the numbers of people who use these institutions. our cultural values will now pop-up in public. Jumping of queues in classy restaurants e.t.c. as ordinary kenyans get more disposable income.

For a moment I thought you were me!
The Safari walk is run down and is quite embarassing. Last year I took a jungu lady there and she was not amused esp with the littering....she was infact furious!

@masukuma did you even read this article? And if you read, did you really understand?

Right there the writer is betraying his own rotten kind of attitude. With this kind of tribalism ati “Somali”… Why Somali in particular? Why didn’t he says Luhyia, or Kale, or Kamba, or Kikuyu, or Masai? How does he go ahead and write about KWS?

@alph,
no. 1. i forgot to mention that the dude who was feeding the Monkey was of somali origin! taking photos akipatia tumbili chakula! To be fair the other guys taking photos while feeding the girrafe were not somalis! so cancel out hiyo statement but pia Sikukuwa nimewahi ona wasomali wengi hivyo kwa game park/orphanage before.

@simonKabz... hiyo place imekuwa MBAYA!!!

Masukumu=Kabogo