Strangers Chat on Bus, Realize They Were in Same Orphanage

Two Liberty University students started chatting on a campus bus and realized they had met each other before—15 years previously and 7,000 miles away, in an orphanage in China. Sophomore Ally Cole says that when she started talking to Ruby Wierzbicki, they discussed their majors and home states before finding out that they had both been adopted from China, the university said in a press release. After the bus ride ended, they kept chatting and discovered they had both been adopted from the Jinan Social Welfare Institute—and they appeared side by side in some old photos they both had.

Both students say they know little about their early childhood and they were stunned to discover the connection. They were adopted just a week apart, Cole when she was six years old and Wierzbicki when she was four. "I think I was just in shock that I actually knew someone from my past," Cole tells CNN. "I think it didn't really hit me until after I went to class." The new friends believe it's not a coincidence that they found each other on a busy campus with more than 15,000 students. "There's no way that two people who were in the same orphanage in a different country can somehow end up at the same school at the same time and have it not be God," Wierzbicki says. (More uplifting news stories.)