A Million Stories

[ a million stories ]

On Saturday, Philadelphia Cambodians observed Ancestors Day, the reunion of ancestral spirits with the living. It's the holiest day of the year in Cambodian Buddhism, and, for the first time in South Philly, it was celebrated at a Buddhist temple that looks like a Buddhist temple. Under a canopy outside the newly renovated Preah Buddha Rangsey Temple at Sixth and Ritner, six monks reciting chants to congregants looked like they could just as easily have been in Phnom Penh as 10 blocks from Cosmi's Deli.

The temple is just three years old, as is the one directly across the street. Both serve the growing Cambodian population in Philly, says Muni Rath, chief monk of the congregation. Rath got a dose of culture shock while navigating Philly's labyrinthine codes and regulations — nearly nonexistent in Cambodia — to get the place up and running back in 2006. Compared to Cambodia, costs were staggering. "It took $10,000 just for the [schematic]," he says. "For $10,000 in Cambodia, you could build two temples."

That didn't stop five men representing Iraq's major quasi-union "labor federations" from speaking to a crowd of 60 at the Friends' Meeting House at Fourth and Arch streets on Monday night. It was their last stop on a three-city tour of the United States.

Overall, the privatization of Iraq's industries has hurt organized labor severely, said Rasim Al-Awadi, president of the General Federation of Iraqi Workers. Under Saddam Hussein, major Iraqi industries were nationalized. Now, Al-Awadi said, once-secure public-sector jobs are no longer safe, and workers from Southeast Asia have been brought in to fill jobs once held by Iraqis.

"Private companies suck Iraqis' blood," Al-Awadi said.

For John Braxton, event organizer and an AFL-CIO Philadelphia member, the takeaway was universal: "Many people here don't realize that privatization takes somebody with a union job and replaces them with a non-union person, and that person gets lower salaries and benefits."

—Julia Harte

Last week, A Million Stories featured a piece about the deadly stabbing of Brian Sutton, 42, by ex-convict Warren Floyd, 52, in a West Philadelphia boarding house. This week, we received a call from Evon Sutton, who felt our article had neglected the most important person in that story — the victim, her son.

The morning of the murder, she says, Sutton, a school-bus driver, had been at his ex-wife's house, helping pack the car to take their daughter, 18, off to her first week of college.

"He was talking about how excited he was that his daughter was going away to school," she remembers.

Sutton then left for the boarding house to visit a friend, saying he'd see the family in the morning. She says police told her that her son had been trying to intervene in a fight between Floyd and another resident of the house when he was killed.

Sutton's two daughters have attended grief counseling, she says, but the elder daughter is now starting her freshman year.

"What made it extra hard was that it was a violent death," she reflects. "And he was not a violent person."

—Isaiah Thompson