A completed story, reported and edited, may obscure a regular feature of journalists’ lives: that they really don’t know at the outset where reporting will lead. That was true for the Monitor’s Taylor Luck and his assistant, Fadi Ibrahim, as they reported in Homs, Syria, on relations between Alawites, Shiites, and Christians in the wake of the civil war. They ended up being invited to a dialogue session, where, Taylor says, the exchanges were often fierce. And then, they were invited to dinner.

“A former MP told us, ‘You will see that despite our differences, we all break bread together.’ It was a chance encounter that showed us that Syria’s diverse groups and minorities not only can get along – they already are. It gave us the sense that, if security holds up, Syria can avoid the sectarian pitfalls that plagued Iraq.”