(UPI) A pair of students at a Virginia university struck up a conversation on a bus and soon discovered they lived at the same orphanage in China 15 years earlier.

Ally Cole, a sophomore at Liberty University in Lynchburg, sat down next to freshman Ruby Wierzbicki on a bus crossing the school's campus and the two students struck up a conversation.

The women discovered they had both been adopted from China, and got out their phones to compare pictures when they discovered they were from the same city, Jinan.

The photos showed the same orphanage.

"We held the photos side by side on our phones and we realized that everything matched, and we knew that it had to be the same place," Wierzbicki said in a Liberty University news release.

The students determined they had been adopted one week apart, at the ages of 6 and 4, and even had photos showing them together at the facility.

"We started scrolling through our photos on our phones, and I realized that Ruby had a lot of photos of me that I'd never seen before and photos where we were together," Cole said. We even had a mutual friend from the orphanage, Emma, that we each had photos with.

"One of the photos was one that we both had, with us standing next to each other, and I hadn't known who the girl next to me was, but now I know," she said.

The students said they don't believe their meeting on the bus was mere happenstance.

"There are people I've talked to about this and they've said, 'What a coincidence.' But we think that this is 100% God," Wierzbicki said. 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.

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