Thai Sweatshop Workers Savor Freedom : North Hollywood: About two dozen of those released find sanctuary at Buddhist temple dedicated to community service.

For more than a year she toiled in slave-like conditions, one of her few mental escapes the peaceful preachings of the monks at the Wat Thai Buddhist Temple here, broadcast on Thai radio.

Their soothing prayers allowed her mind to drift and, just as it had for many in Los Angeles’ vast Thai community, the temple became a sanctuary for the 27-year-old garment worker, who was released from federal custody Friday with about two dozen other refugees--all Thai women--from an El Monte sweatshop.

“We were longing to come to the temple . . . but we never thought we would ever be able to be here,” said the woman who called herself Wan. “Now we are here.”

Since it was constructed more than 20 years ago--the first Thai temple built in the United States--the North Hollywood wat has been the linchpin of the city’s Thai community and an integral player in various crises--from providing food for impoverished families to helping organize the release of the ex-factory workers and finding them temporary homes.

The Wat Thai was among a coalition of Asian organizations, including Korean Immigrant Workers and the Asian Pacific American Legal Center, that petitioned the Thai consulate here to pressure American officials to release the workers from a federal detention center.

*

“This is the heart of the Thai community,” said San Hongnoi, 28, a worker at the Thai Community Development Center in Downtown Los Angeles. “This is where Thai people come for almost everything. Whenever you’re homesick, you come here.”

For the first 10 years after the temple opened, Thai emigres traveled from as far as San Diego and Bakersfield to the site, which is the only monastery in the nation constructed like Buddhist temples in Thailand. With its giant red-slate roof and gilded edges, the temple looms over a nine-acre site that houses a community center offering an array of services, from basic meditation and Buddhist chanting to citizenship classes, Thai language courses and traditional Saturday barbecues.

“The temple here is multipurpose--religious and social,” said Phumisiri Chaipricha, who has been a monk at the temple for nine years.

“It’s sort of like a bridge connecting people to their country or each other,” he said. “Thai people come every weekend to meet each other and talk to each other and feel connected.”

As a monk at the temple and in the community, Chaipricha, with his colleagues, provides spiritual guidance for the Buddhist followers. It is considered a blessing when these spiritual leaders, draped in brilliant orange cloths with their heads cleanshaven, chant at someone’s house or even invite a person to chant along with them.

Saturday afternoon, Chaipricha and about a dozen other monks at the temple chanted with Wan and 19 other Thai women who were brought to the temple for a lunch of rice, lentils, Thai noodles and fresh fruit.

“We feel more secure here,” said a 45-year-old woman who had been working at the sweatshop for 3 1/2 years.

Wan also described a welcome sense of calm that she had not felt since she was put to work in the garment factory more than a year ago.

“The monks, they are so important to my life, to the lives of many Thai Buddhist people, that being here with them, here at the temple, is so overwhelming,” she said. “It makes me so very happy.”