The morning we hand down

Someone asked me, in the days before the holiday, whether I was ready for Eid. I gave the usual answer, the one of logistics: the shopping, the cooking, the small economics of who visits whom and when. The question lingered, because in answering it I had skipped past the Eid that formed me. Long before it was a thing to organise, Eid was a new dress worn stiff and bright for the first time, henna grown dark on my palms than the night before, Eidiyah counted and recounted in my tiny handbag. It was the early hour when the light was soft and the heat had not yet found its way, when a child could cross three houses before breakfast and come home having eaten in all of them. We were all that child once. The same holiday we now organise is the one that organised us, and we have always assumed we would hand the same morning down to whoever came next.

This year the morning was shorter. The holiday arrived inside a hot spell the meteorology office had been tracking warning of temperatures climbing well into the high forties, and the instinct was to keep the children in, to trade the run between houses for a cooled room. Who escaped the heat came down to what a family could afford, some on Al Jabal Al Akhdhar where the air still let children run, others in the full weight of it with far less to fall back on.

What that heat costs the children specifically has now been studied in its own right. The Environment Authority and Unicef have released the Climate Landscape Analysis for Children and Adolescents, the first comprehensive national study of how climate change reaches Oman’s youngest residents. Its sharpest figure points forward: under higher-emission scenarios, Oman could face an additional 20 to 30 heatwave days each year similar to the days we lived through this Eid. A child’s body does not regulate heat the way an adult’s does. On the page that is a line on a graph. For a child it is 20 to 30 mornings spent inside, year after year, until they add up to a childhood.

The study’s hardest finding sits beneath the temperatures. The children who carry the heaviest exposure are the ones we consult the least, present everywhere in the consequences and almost nowhere in the decisions. While we boast of them as our future, the report shows they are systematically underrepresented in how we plan and fund the climate response, and it asks for something concrete in return: a standing voice for adolescents in the rooms where these choices are made, and child-sensitive thinking built into budgets from the start, rather than added once the spending is already set. The distance between most exposed and least heard is the distance this Eid made visible.

So when I am asked again whether I am ready for Eid, the question has grown larger than the one that was meant. I was ready with the cooking and the visits. I am far less sure we are ready in the way that decides whether the children who will inherit this holiday can still step into a morning that belongs to them. The heat kept its appointment this year. The report has told us, in our own data and our own children’s words, what it is asking. What remains open is whether we will answer at the pace a childhood actually keeps.