Applause broke out as a group of brightly dressed teenagers glided down the escalator at Salt Lake City International Airport on Sunday. Then tears broke, too.

Laura Lee Carlisle, formerly of Riverton and now of Jerome, Idaho, wept as her daughter Becca, 17, came forward wearing an ocean-blue shalwar camise and a beaming smile. Said Carlisle: "I cry at just about anything, but this is something really big," as she hugged her daughter.

The reunion for Carlisle and 24 other families brought to an end nearly a week of hand-wringing and sleeplessness that began when violence broke out during their students' 17-day humanitarian trip to India.

The teens were nearly a thousand miles away from the bloodshed in the country's capital, said C.F. Diamond, father of student Sarah Diamond. But even before the Mumbai terror attacks, Diamond said that he had been worried about his daughter's proximity to Kashmir, the long-disputed territory that some have speculated was why the Mumbai attacks were carried out.

The 24 students from seven area high schools had traveled to Chamba, in the state of Himachal Pradesh, under the aegis of Youth Making a Difference, a Sugar House-based nonprofit founded by businessman Robert Baird and his wife Jodee.

Each year since 2005, YMAD has led groups of students on humanitarian missions, bringing medical supplies, food, and clothing to four orphanages in one of India's remotest areas, high in the Himalayas.

Baird said that even though the violence was far away from Chamba, it gave everyone on the trip the occasion to cultivate more compassion. As events in Mumbai had been unfolding, Baird -- a bearded, balding man with a beatific smile, said "amidst the quiet, loving and caring" community of Chamba, he had realized that "the nation of India now has what 9/11 was to us."

Baird moved easily through the swarms of family members and friends as his daughter, Eden Cowart, 26, explained that the purpose of YMAD was not only to help the orphans of Chamba but to develop in the Utah students leadership skills they could carry into the rest of their lives, and values they could return with to their communities.

"A lot of humanitarian expeditions geared at teens are about just showing up and getting on a plane," said Cowart. But what distinguishes YMAD is the degree to which participants are involved in every aspect of the trip's fund-raising, planning, and implementation.

Becca Carlisle said the experience in Chamba and the knowledge of the Mumbai massacres had made her more keenly aware of the connections between people.

Carlisle, 17, formerly a Riverton High senior who now lives in Jerome, Idaho, had spent a year studying Hindi and helping to raise more than $350,000 for the journey. The money paid for the teens' travel, but more importantly, for blankets, shoes, vitamins, and other necessities for the village.

Carlisle said that it was all the more meaningful to her, then, when the children to whom she taught a health workshop began to call her Dee-Dee, making her realize the connection between India and the U.S. and, she said, "people across the world."

Some of Chamba's orphans have been abandoned by parents who cannot afford to keep them. Many girls -- as young as 14 -- are escapees from arranged marriages.

Some children have been orphaned or left fatherless in conflicts over the years between militants over the partitioning of India and Pakistan.

The children live in dormitory-style housing, sleeping on cots. Their latrines are holes in the ground with footpads for squatting.

Statistics about the number of orphans in India as a whole vary widely. Some sources say the range is between 12 and 35 million. Chamba's orphans number 200.

As for fears for their own children, most of the YMAD parents said that once they took a look at a map and realized how far Chumba was Mumbai -- it took the students three days to get to Chumba from Delhi -- they were relieved.

Said Laura Lee Carlisle, "There was a point, though, when I thought to myself, 'well, if something happens to her then." She paused, her eyes welling up again. "She'd be doing something valuable."

As her mother hugged her, Becca Carlisle said that she was torn about coming home.

"I want to be with my brothers and sisters in Chamba, but I also want to be with my family here," she said. "I'm really right now in both places."