Over the summer I got my first tattoo; a triangle with the word “witness” in the place of the bottom line. This decision was somewhat against the approval of some people in my life, from a teacher to a Sunday school leader to a close friend to even members of my own family. I got the tattoo because, for me, a tattoo is about expressing yourself and proclaiming a part of yourself to others.

My tattoo is not a fashion statement or a “fad”, and it is my own body to decorate as I please. In this case, the word “witness” has a lot of meaning to me and always has. With the events that have been happening in our country and around the globe recently, the word and its meaning have felt more prevalent than ever.

I originally got the tattoo as a way to express my desire and promise to witness the world around me as it is; no turning a blind eye or ignoring things that aren't pretty, refusing to fall into a daze of, “Not my circus, not my monkey”. This concept has helped to define who I am and who I want to be for the past three years, ever since I went on a mission trip to Honduras in my junior year of high school.

While in Honduras, I saw some of the worst that the world has to offer. I saw people lying in alleyways, too far gone for any sort of coherence. I played patty-cake with children whose bones were jutting from under their skin. I handed clothes to mothers and fathers with eyes hollow from exhaustion and hopelessness. I watched a small pickup truck drive by with convicts crammed like sardines in the bed, black bags covering their heads. I listened as gang members walked up to my group leader (a man) and, gesturing to me and my friends, offered to “take these girls off your hands”.

When I was serving at the hospital in Honduras, I met a lady whose baby had died literally an hour before we arrived at the hospital. She had been a stillborn baby. There was no one else in the room with the woman and she was all alone, and I stayed outside the door until someone who could speak adequate Spanish came to pray for her. I couldn't just leave her alone in that room, knowing that she was there suffering, with no one bothering to comfort her in her grief.

I also met a young girl with a massive brain tumor that had blinded her and would likely kill her. Her brother was staying in the hospital with her to make sure she wasn't scared because her parents could not afford to take the time off of work to be there with her. She was readying to be transferred to a better hospital for an operation, and when we asked her how she felt about the possibility of being able to see again, she smiled and said, "I'm not afraid because I have God. I will see again." Her brother had the most beautiful crystal blue eyes; they looked like liquidized chips of the sky when he started crying along with his sister as we prayed over her.

There was also a room in the hospital that I walked past, and a little kid was hooked up to all of these monitors and equipment. The heart monitor started screaming and nurses walked tiredly past me into the room as the kid started seizing up. The other children looked on blankly; the sight was obviously a normal occurrence, one that they were all desensitized to, but I ran away because I was scared of seeing this tiny child die before my eyes. Later, when I passed the room again, I did not see the kid’s bed.

There was a 10-month-old baby boy that a member of our group bonded with immediately; they were playing and laughing and talking gibberish and it was the sweetest thing imaginable. When our group member started to pick up the baby, the child screamed in pain. Later, the baby's caretaker told us that he had been repeatedly raped and that his anus needed reconstruction. Yet there he was, smiling and laughing and loving the attention we gave him, expected to make a good recovery.

There was so much beauty and pain and horror and faith in that one tiny dingy hospital, and there is so much more all over the world. These people are out there, not just in Honduras but also those next to us in classes or across the ocean, in different walks of life or just like us, who suffer silently or loudly, with depression, anxiety, abuse, poverty, lack of resources.

There has, just over the past few weeks, been so much pain and heartache and suffering. There have been terrorist attacks in the very cities some of us call home, natural disasters that have destroyed some of those homes, and countless other tragedies that seem to only stack up, to the point that I begin to wonder when the pile will finally topple over. And yet, there is also so much faith, and hope, and love, and beauty in all those same places and situations, walking hand in hand and side by side; two by two like in Noah's Ark.

These situations and these people all deserved to have their pain and their beauty acknowledged and not forgotten. They deserve to be recognized as valid, not because our recognition makes them valid, but because they already are and we would be selfish and foolish to pretend otherwise.

The world is there on our doorstep, asking to be seen, ready to be understood.

I want to be a witness to that, and that is why I have a tattoo.