27/09/2026
ٻارن جو تخليقي ميلو - سَن
Children Creative Festival (CCF) — Sann
Our eighth stop took us to Sann, in Manjhand Taluka, Jamshoro district, lying on the western bank of the Indus river. Unlike most of our stops, this one wasn't chosen for its need alone but for what its neglect represents. Sann is the birthplace and hometown of G.M. Sayed, regarded as one of the founding fathers of modern Sindhi nationalism and that inheritance has followed the town ever since. Despite its population, larger than Manjhand's, Sann has never been elevated beyond a Union Council; Manjhand, not Sann, was granted taluka status instead. The reason isn't administrative, it's political: Sann's identity as the ideological home of Sindhi nationalism made it a target for deliberate marginalization. Citizens who have taken this and other grievances to every office they can find, including education department, describe getting the same answer, delivered indirectly: it's policy, nothing can be done. It's a quiet sentence but it says everything about who controls access here and how political punishment can operate without ever being named as such. The town still has no gas pipeline; households still rely on wood for daily fuel, this despite Article 158 of Constitution, which grants the province producing a resource priority right to it and despite Sindh producing more than 60% of the country's natural gas. Years of unavailability tell a very different story than the one repeatedly promised in the government and ruling party's media rhetoric. This wasn't our first encounter with that neglect. We had run an independent two day children's festival in Manjhand back in 2021/2022, outside of CCF initiative. Returning to the same region five years later brought that earlier trip back vividly and what struck us most was how little had moved. The problems we documented then are still here, largely unchanged. If anything, the school we partnered with this time has deteriorated further since.
It's against that backdrop that the scale of this festival mattered. We ran it out of a Govt Girls High School in Sann and rather than staying contained to one school, it pulled in children from across the town, combined attendance over the two days crossed 1,000, our largest yet. For a town so often written off administratively, that turnout felt like its own quiet argument. And yet even that scale wasn't enough to earn Sann its own name in the coverage that followed. Several local reporters and media houses who covered the festival didn't name Sann in their reporting and some didn't even get the festival's name right, despite complete details having been provided to them beforehand. It's hard not to read that as deliberate too, one more small way the town gets written out of its own story, this time by the very outlets meant to tell it.
The CCF itself followed our usual structure; arts workshop, creative writing workshop and a main stage anchored by the Roshni Books Corner, puppet theatre, and children's performances and speeches but we pushed it further than we had before. For the first time, we invited well known writers, activists and educators to speak directly to the children, each trying to compress years of hard won experience into language a child could actually carry with them: talks on adventures in science and literature, on imagining careers beyond the usual paths of engineering, teaching and medicine, on the power and joy of education itself and on what it means to open a book and open a world. We ran STEAM competitions: children presenting science projects on cleaning the Indus, removing pollution and encroachment from the river, the solar system and water purification. Given everything Sann itself lacks in basic services, the environmental consciousness in these projects didn't feel incidental, these are children who understand scarcity and ecological strain because they live inside it.
That understanding carried straight onto the main stage. The tableaus staged there were unusually pointed for an audience this young: performances on the Indus's water being stolen, land turning barren, the Mohana fishing communities losing their livelihood and the sea steadily swallowing the coast. It's the same throughline as the political neglect Sann itself experiences, just told through the river instead of the town. Alongside this, cultural stalls of ajrak, rillis and Sindhi bharat gave the festival its textural anchor, and the children built a small art gallery entirely from their own work. For the science screening, we returned to Cosmos, dubbed into Sindhi language by Nawaz Soomro.
Alongside all of this, a Roshni Library Corner was established at the school with 100 books, backed by an MoU signed with the school head, Sayeda Shaheen Shah, committing two days of reading period to the school's own timetable. The aim behind these corners has never just been about stocking shelves, it's about reviving a reading culture that feels increasingly at risk, at a moment when even adults are drifting from books in the age of AI. For children, that means catching the habit early, before disinterest has a chance to set in, and using it as a doorway into science and the kind of curiosity that keeps a mind restless in the best way. In the arts workshop, that same connection to place surfaced again, children reached for color and imagery drawn directly from what surrounds them: rivers, mountains, greenery. Several went further, collecting discarded material from around the town and turning it into sculpture, building art out of what had been left behind rather than what was handed to them, a small, unplanned echo of the town's own condition. The creative writing workshop is where all of this crystallized most clearly. Most girls wrote about careers, education, and the freedom to choose their own path but a few pushed past the workshop's prompt entirely. One or two girls submitted, as their final piece, not a creative writing exercise but an open letter to CCF team, arguing directly against early marriage. Others wrote plainly about what their town lacks: education, health, roads, and raised again and again, the absence of gas in Sann, alongside schools that barely function.
The CCF team knows two days cannot fix a system broken this deeply. But efforts like this can show us what possibility looks like when opportunities are given fairly, when a system is built around serving people rather than controlling them. Education seems to be the single biggest lever for keeping a population trapped or setting it free and more often than not, the neglect isn't a resource problem, it's a lack of political will, corruption and political patronage that keeps it that way. What Sann's children need, and what children everywhere deserve, isn't more buildings or one off events: it's pedagogy that actually works, a system free of political interference, room for innovation in how education is delivered and a classroom built around the child, one that raises critical, curious minds for tomorrow instead of quietly containing them.
— CCF Team
Children Creative Festival (CCF) Sindh 2026 | An independent, non funded & collaborative initiative by Roshni, Artghar & Parinday
Two days of the festival cost PKR 90k / USD 325 — covering travel, workshop materials, artist and facilitator fees, stage managers' allowance, media, printing and other miscellaneous costs. Books for the library corner were freely contributed by Roshni Publication.
