Turtles, Trash and Iglesias

'I want to listen to Enrique Iglesias or Celine Dion, please auntie,' insists my eldest niece, who sometimes has this cute, childish presence, as she touches the pin that holds together her tightly wrapped black embellished headscarf. I look at her chubby cheeks and now slightly pouty mouth in my rearview mirror after asking what song she prefers.
We are driving through a part of Muscat that has a hold on me as we listen to the BBC World Service on the radio.
My own kid wants to listen to Bowie, but I decide to indulge my niece first and put on the one song by Iglesias that I can sort of tolerate. I tell her a story about how when I was on holiday with my parents in the South of Spain as a teenager, someone at the table tried to impress me by claiming he was friends with a Spanish guy whose father was Julio Iglesias, the tanned singer.
Not entertained by my story or the song, my niece is now starting to give me a certain look from the back seat, the one she usually gives when she starts to get visibly annoyed.
'I am sorry, but I am not going to play Celine inside my car. What if someone overhears her singing? I have a reputation to protect, habibti,' I jokingly tell her as the inner snob in me smiles.
Although I am just pulling her leg, I do suddenly remember the complaints from while watching Titanic with two of my friends in a cinema in Amsterdam after its premiere in the nineties.
I think back then, while feeling bored and slouching on these big leather seats, we actually coined the term 'cringing'. After all, it means 'a strong feeling of secondhand embarrassment or awkwardness, the kind where you physically recoil or wince because something is so cheesy, sentimental, or uncool that it is painful to watch.” I got that definition from EcoGPT, the only AI my own kid allows me to use, because “all the others harm the environment, mama!” This one apparently uses way less computer power while its energy comes from clean sources in Finland. Plus, every time someone uses EcoGPT, real trees get planted.
Thinking of the environment, I decide to shift my niece's area of focus once again, and ask her to and get her to look at a picture on my phone of a beach in Oman that has recently been covered in black oil spilled by a stranded tanker.
I tell her to send the image to a few certain contacts and ask them to guess where it is.
'Ras Madrakah,' several replied, to my surprise. I was expecting 'LMK' (short for I do not know) as not all Omanis have visited this coastal area known for its biodiversity but that is an eight-hour drive away from Muscat. My husband and his friends used to go fishing at these relatively untouched beaches.
No longer thinking of Celine, Iglesias, and Bowie, and back to reality, we all start worrying about the turtles, the fish, and the rare and already endangered Arabian Sea humpback whale.
The image of the oil spill sits right next to a picture taken by me of a beach in Al Seeb where a family having a picnic left behind plastic ice cream containers and bottles, waiting for someone else to clean up their mess.
But instead of a cleaner, tides, waves, and coastal winds will probably carry their trash out to sea, where it will further harm marine life through ingestion or entanglement, and break down into microplastics that may pollute our water or food.
As I look at my eldest niece and my own child, I think of something another world leader once said: 'When our children look back on this time and this place, they will be pleased with the intentions stated and the commitments made [towards a better environment]. But they will judge us by the actions we take from this day forward.' Indeed, they have the right to judge our actions, inactions and to do better.