Well, today's search was highly disappointing. Yes, I'm glad we did not find anything terrible - I'm hoping against the odds that this boy is still alive. The disappointing part was the overall disorganization of the search. There was a huge lack of a plan, no one with real leadership leading the event, etc.
The plan was to start at the apartments at 3pm. I arrived at about 3:10 to find a number of media vehicles around a good sized group of people. I walked up to the group, expecting the "training" session to be taking place here. Nope. Just the organizer giving a few minute details and explaining to everyone how to get to the area by the river we would be searching.
We then had to all get back into our cars and drive about 8-10 minutes to the search site. What?! Okay, whatever. I could've done without the meeting at the apartment part. But get this.... The person who was supposed to do our training, and the lady who was leading the search didn't show up right away, so we all waited.... And waited.... And waited. Almost an entire hour later, they finally show up. The lady who organized the search and two "commissioners" who she touted would be a part of the search. They were both wearing uniforms that looked like police uniforms - and most people, including some media, believes these men WERE law enforcement officers. I've looked up where these men came from, and it looks like a non-profit public safety group? "Community Policing Services". They do some public safety work, mediation, trainings, etc. I didn't see any info on leading and participating in searches for missing people. I'm not sure if they've had previous experience or training with this before or not.
We were given basic instructions (don't touch possible evidence, take pictures of possible evidence and mark the location someway). These "commissioners" brought walkie talkies for each group of ten searchers. We split into groups and were told we were going to be executing a grid search, and were told a few random things about what a grid search was - and that searching a simple square mile can take 3 hours doing a grid search....
But they didn't tell anyone how to execute this, where groups should go or anything of the like. Off people went. The people we were in a group with initially moved too quickly for our pace, so we lost them (including the person with the walkie talkie) rather quickly. Whenever someone did find something, none of the walkie talkies were in range enough to report back to the commissioners.
I'm glad I went today, but am disappointed by the lack of organization. I know people want to find Barway and bring him home as quickly as possible, but we should be organizing and planning well executed searches to ensure we're doing the best we can to find Barway. It seems as though two of the bigger Facebook groups for Barway are kind of in an us vs them mentality (well, that wasn't OUR search, etc.), which is disappointing. Think of how strong we could be, if everyone just joined together in their efforts.