KNOXVILLE, Tenn. - Odette. Benita. Valancia. Atanie.

Each Sunday morning, members of White Stone Church spread photos of the girls' grinning, impish faces across a folding table before 10 a.m. worship, then prayed for the day the children might join them.

When the churchgoers closed their eyes and bowed their heads, it no longer mattered that 1,400 miles separated them from the girls or that they lived in a Haitian village whose dirt floors and lack of running water were unthinkable in north Knoxville's quilt of neatly tended subdivisions and fast-food drive-thrus.

They are "Our Girls," the worshippers told one another.

Over six years, the girls of Coq Chante had come to feel like family. Now, after trips by dozens to Haiti, thousands of dollars raised and spent and countless hours pouring over adoption paperwork, the bond between the congregation and 19 children from another world felt unbreakable.

Until a Tuesday night in January.

White Stone's worship pastor, Mark Zimmerman, had returned from Haiti at 10:45 the previous night; it was his 20th trip. The Zimmermans planned a family night at home and Mark was in the basement, where framed black-and-white portraits of Coq Chante's girls line the paneling over the pingpong table. He was stacking wood in the fireplace when the phone rang.

Haiti has been hit by a massive earthquake, a church member told him. All the phones are out. We can't reach Coq Chante. There's no telling what's happened to our girls.

"God, please," Mark's wife, Angie, prayed silently. "I can't be there. You can."

The first thing they noticed about Port-au-Prince was the smell - raw sewage, charcoal and diesel fumes simmering in the tropical heat.

"Well Toto, we're not in Kansas anymore," Andy Coleman said. For six days, the men helped build a school at Coq Chante, a village of makeshift homes without electricity where Juste ran an orphanage housing a dozen girls.

Haiti's orphans have drawn tremendous attention in the weeks since the earthquake, after an Idaho church group was arrested for trying to take children they falsely claimed were parentless out of the country without government approval. Indeed, before the disaster, Haiti was home to 380,000 children who had lost one or both parents, according to UNICEF.

Thousands of those children were like most at Coq Chante and Belloc - surrendered by living mothers and fathers too poor and overburdened to care for them.

That first morning at Belloc, White Stone's women set up a makeshift clinic in the courtyard. But Karen Bates wandered around, unsure what to do.

Soon, she noticed a diminutive Haitian woman walking toward her, a bundle in her arms - an infant, perhaps 8 months old, wrapped in a blanket and topped with a pink crocheted cap.

"She handed him to me. I was standing there looking at his little face and I thought, 'OK, maybe this is what I'm here for,"' Karen Bates recalls. "I turned around and she was walking down the road. Oh my God!"

The mother of tiny Wousamy came back at day's end. But she returned every morning, placing her baby in Karen Bates' arms. He was the youngest of eight or nine children in a family struggling for food, the couple learned.

On their last morning, the churchgoers climbed into the truck for the ride back to the airport when the woman reappeared, trotting alongside the moving flatbed and holding out her baby.

"Mama Wousamy, Mama Wousamy," she called to Karen Bates, who broke into tears. At the airport in Port-au-Prince, waiting for their flight, Mike Bates came back from the men's room to realize he'd missed a conversation among other members of the group.

"Hey," one of the men said to Mike, slapping him on the thigh. "You're going to adopt a kid."

More than four years after that first trip to Haiti, the Bates were still waiting to bring Wousamy home, their application caught in Haiti's bureaucracy. Now they had company.

Kevin Rudd, the kind of guy who loved to roughhouse with his teenage son Alex and make fun of wife Gina's "chick flicks," was having trouble working and sleeping. Three weeks after getting back from Haiti in May 2008, the couple was on their back deck setting up a sun canopy when Kevin blurted out something about adopting a little girl named Benita. Had he considered what it would cost to bring home a child?

Each time the missionaries returned home, it seemed another family followed the Rudds' and the Bates' lead. Mark and Angie Zimmerman told their children to get ready for a sister named Valancia. Al and Sherry Fitzpatrick decided to bring home Dieula, to be renamed Jayla. Andy and Allyson Coleman filled out the paperwork for Odette.

Meanwhile, Lorie Johnson was campaigning for husband, Darrell, to go to Haiti. Finally, in November 2009, Darrell Johnson turned his one-man chiropractic office over to another practitioner and went to meet the little girl named Atanie his wife couldn't stop talking about.

When Lorie returned to Coq Chante weeks later, she carried the 4-year-old into the house where the missionaries slept - a privilege reserved only for the girls whose adoptions were under way.

It was a Sunday night, Jan. 10.

Atanie, freshly bathed and giddy with the adventure of sharing Lorie's bed, rolled over and over under the covers until she fell asleep. But in the night she stirred and Lorie felt two small, warm hands reaching for her in the darkness.

"Are you there?" Atanie murmured.

"Do you have any news about the girls?"

The Zimmermans' phones kept ringing. It was Tuesday, Jan. 12, and television was reporting a massive earthquake had hit Port-au-Prince.

Kevin Rudd tried every Haiti number saved to his cell phone but could not get through. Don't worry, he told his wife, Coq Chante is miles away. Then CNN reported the quake's epicenter at 13 miles southwest of the capital - nearly half the distance to the orphanage - and he grew silent.

The evening passed with no word at the Coleman house and Allyson settled into a fitful sleep. Then, soon after midnight, a sound downstairs awakened her. Sitting up in bed, she heard Andy weeping.

At last, one of the calls had gotten through, churchgoer Brian Lloyd explained when Allyson joined Andy at the dining table. Much of the orphanage at Coq Chante had collapsed. And their Odette was missing.

Mike and Karen Bates, too, were roused to learn that Wousamy could not be accounted for.

At 12:57 a.m., Lorie Johnson's phone rang just as the home alarm sounded, indicating a car had pulled into the driveway. When she picked up, Kevin Rudd was on the line. "Which door do you want me to come in?" he asked.

Downstairs, she opened the door to find Mark at Kevin's side. The men stepped in, their eyes cast down.

"The orphanage has collapsed," Kevin said. "Everybody got out except Atanie. And she's gone."

"No! It can't be!" Lorie cried as she fell to the couch, sobbing.

"It can't be. I was just there! Everything was fine. Everything was OK.

"These are our girls!"