Globetrotting teddy bears

Last March, I received a phone call from a friend living near Hull. He asked if my young daughter would be prepared to receive a teddy bear that was travelling the world as part of a school project. He had received it from a friend in Holland. The school was in Illinois USA and the young children had been instructed to each dispatch a teddy bear to anyone in the world that they knew, with the instructions that it should then be posted on to another friend anywhere in the world and then another friend and so on. Instructions included with the globetrotting bear said that it should be returned to the school address by the end of October. I said yes and the bear duly arrived a few days later. Because it was an interesting project my daughter took the bear to school to show her teacher and classmates. Sitting next to her, her schoolfriend said that she had also received a bear that had originated from the same Illinois school. It had come via friends in South Africa and she brought it in the next day. I have a photo of the two girls showing off their (very similar looking) bears in the school playground. There had been no mutual discussion or even knowledge of the project and it seems remarkable that these two bears had travelled the world independently and turned up in the same school classroom within a couple of days of each other. What are the chances…?