When four Durham County women wheeled their bulging luggage to the customs counter after landing at Port-au-Prince Monday, they had some explaining to do.

Inside the eight suitcases, vacuum-packed into contorted, football-sized bundles, were 25 wedding dresses.

Indeed, Carolyn Allen, Mari Bouvier, Cheryl Catlin and Jessie Larkins, have had a lot of explaining to do for weeks as they spread the word that they needed wedding dresses. Lots of them. To take to Haiti.

What for? The answer was as simple as it was compelling: Haitians will sometimes forego marriage because they can't afford a dress.

This troubles ministers like Leon Dorleans, the pastor of several churches scattered around the Port-Au-Prince area.

Caitlin's husband, Scot, has long been involved in missionary work in Haiti, and most recently has focused on helping set up computers in schools. When he was visiting his friend Dorleans in January, the pastor asked if Catlin would pass the word to send wedding dresses.

Making it possible for young couples to get married is an obvious concern for a pastor, said Larkins. Also, from a practical public health view, she said, it makes sense to promote an institution that encourages monogamy in Haiti, which has the hemisphere's highest HIV infection rate, as high as 13 percent in some rural areas, according to the Haitian Embassy.

Larkins is the associate pastor of Mt. Sylvan United Methodist Church in Durham, and the other three women are members there. Dozens of North Carolina churches and nonprofit organizations -- many of them in the Triangle -- have long sent a stream of money, critical supplies and volunteer labor to groups in Haiti, which is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere.

Wedding dresses, though, were an unusual request. And Dorleans was hoping they could find half a dozen each for four churches, where they would be placed in special storage closets to be used again and again.

The women went about the daunting task of finding so many dresses in a thoroughly modern way: they turned to the Internet. They found for modest prices online -- four from eBay, three off of Craigslist -- and found others free on a web swap site. They also harnessed the power of social networking, hitting up a web of friends via Facebook.

Every dress had a story. One was donated by a neighbor of Catlin's, Joyce Young. Young had just given it to a thrift shop and was dismayed when she heard about the need in Haiti. A friend of hers, though, heard what had happened and surprised Young by retrieving it from the shop and giving it back so that, it, too, could go to Port-au-Prince.

Two more dresses, meanwhile, came from the same family -- a mother-in-law and a daughter -- who were friends of the Catlins.

The Friday before the four women left for Haiti, they gathered in Catlin's basement to pack the dresses and Young came over to help. With so many dresses to handle, they adopted an assembly-line style. They folded the dresses, then stuffed then into plastic bags, then used a vacuum cleaner to suck out the air, squeezing the dresses down so all could fit into eight suitcases. Then one woman would would sprawl across a suitcase to hold the top down as another zipped it shut.

As each bag was filled, Catlin or her husband put it on a bathroom scale. Each woman could check two bags under 50 pounds apiece without paying extra, so a goal was to distribute the load evenly. Enough weight allowance was left after the dresses for more than 50 pounds of school and medical supplies and other useful items, like paint rollers.

At one point in the dress-packing operation, Young stopped in mid-fold. She had spotted something sewn onto a dress -- the one from the mother-in-law in family that donated two dresses -- and called out to the others. A gold wedding band!

And an instant mystery.

Scot Catlin picked up a phone and walked out of the room dialing. A few minutes later he returned with the answer: The woman had taken off the ring when her husband died and attached it to her dress. She thought that would be a safe place, but had promptly forgotten it.

The ring had been lost 24 years.

"If I hadn't folded it over ... " she said, stopping at the thought. Then she went back to folding.

One memory saved, the makings for dozens more en route.