An Honors Option Project
For International Relations
INR2002-001
Palm Beach Community College
Central Campus
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Honors Option Agreement
For Dr. Victor Aikhionbare
Growing up in the United States, I never gave much thought to human rights violations
across the country and definitely took all of my freedoms for granted. In 1997 I began reading
Colors, a magazine produced by the United Colors of Benetton that focused on “the rest of the
world.” The first issue that I read struck me in such a way that I could never begin to explain.
There were pictures of people starving and articles about what the best type of can to use is when
building a house from nothing. At this point, I was not as concerned about human rights as I was
with just how much of my life I take for granted in general. To me, hunger was what I felt when I
did not have time to grab breakfast in the morning. To the people in the magazine, hunger was
what they felt when they went several days without food.
In 1998 I was skimming through my new issue of the magazine and came across an
interesting page about what people have to go through to come to a new country. Several
countries had been listed (including the U.S.) with a description of all the red tape for immigrants.
Japan’s section still sticks out in my mind: they had only admitted one immigrant the year prior. At
the bottom of the page was the name Amnesty International (AI), with a web address. I had never
heard of AI before, so when I got home I went online to see what it was. This was when I finally
discovered what human rights were about. I must have spent hours just reading through the
information before me. I was so in awe of how lucky I really am, and decided to get involved
somehow to help people and to inform my friends and family about how well off we are.
Even then, though, I did not really know specifics about what was going on. I knew there
was torture, and I knew women were oppressed. I knew that people were persecuted for their
religion, but never to what extent this was going on. I decided for my International Relations class
to choose human rights as a topic so that I could learn the details behind this. Once I chose the
general area, I remembered seeing a new project model to design a web page and, having a little
bit of experience with this in the past, decided to give it a try. It would have been enough for me to
just research the information and write a paper increasing my knowledge, but I realized that if I did
a web page I could expand my audience from 4 or 5 people to a million. I hope that even one
person will stumble across my web page and be touched the way I was the first time I read Colors
or the first time I went to the Amnesty web page and realize how lucky we truly are in America.
Once I decided what my project would be, I realized that I needed to narrow down my
topic. I began researching various countries, and I was overwhelmed with information. I narrowed
down my search to eighteen countries from each region of the world, some of which are known for
human rights abuses, and others which people may not have heard of. Even then, there was so
much information in front of me. I narrowed my topic down even further, picking just one or two
countries from each region; I decided at that point to put up links for people to access web pages
of various human rights NGO’s, and also to continue working on the page even after the semester
is over.
I had no idea when I started the web page what I was getting into. On top of all the
research, I spent two to three hours writing about and programming the HTML for each country. I
must admit that it is a bit discouraging to work so hard and long on something and then look it over
and not see very much. There is so much information on the page; I know I have well exceeded
the 2,000 word minimum, but I just wish I had been able to get up more information before the
deadline. I mentioned earlier that I decided to keep adding to the page once the semester is over,
and that gives me some comfort. I have information for so many more countries than what I was
able to get up, and I would hate for that to go to waste and not be out there for the world to read
about. I know a little bit about building web pages, but I am far from being an expert. My design is
simple, but in a way I think it is better to keep it simple as fancy programming would probably just
distract from the point. I spent quite some time finding pictures to post for each country, but some
of them were a bit gruesome so I decided not to put them up. I did not want to turn people away
with morbid images.
Research proved to be a bit more difficult than I had expected. I found an extensive
amount of information, but I wanted to use sources that are credible. Even that was a bit difficult,
however, as most of my sources used each other’s information and statistics, so I kept reading the
same things again and again.
As I continued my research, I came across many historical references and terrorist groups
that I had never heard of before. History is definitely not my best subject, particularly world history.
Consequently, I could not fully grasp the information before me regarding what was going on and
why people were having their rights abused. This the case, I decided to include a brief
introduction for each country to give the reader some background information, to prevent the
confusion that I had.
For the design itself, as I mentioned earlier, I kept it simple. I looked through the old web
page files on my computer and found the notebook paper background that is on the index page. I
thought it looked great, but I did not like the way the countries looked when I made them links and
they became underlined. I decided to use a little arrow button to put the link on, for effect. I sent
some of my friends and professors to the page for criticism, it was brought to my attention by
someone that it was not obvious that the arrows were the links. If I get too many complaints like
that I will change it, but for now I like the design. Another problem I have encountered is that
sometimes pages will not load or people get a message that a page is unknown. I have only
gotten this myself once, and I assume it is a problem with Geocities (my hosting site), so it is
nothing that I can fix. Because I am using a free hosting service, there are unsightly ad boxes in
the corners of the page. I was designing the text to work around the box, until a friend told me it
was possible to close the ad box, so I made a note of that on the bottom of the main page.
Overall, I had a fun time doing this project. It did not come out as well as I had imagined
it, but I definitely learned more from this than I would have with just doing a research paper. Of all
the honors projects I have ever completed, this is definitely the one I have put the most work into.
I do sincerely hope that someone will go to the page, read everything that I have said, and take to
heart what people in the rest of the world experience every day of their lives. This, in turn, will
hopefully make the reader a better person who can appreciate life and the freedoms that we have
in the U.S. a little more.
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