CRIME | Police arrest five in ID theft ring that has plagued Bellevue, rest of Eastside [5]
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Program helps non-English speakers deal with new life
I-90 light-rail ruling headed back to court BY NAT LEVY Bellevue Reporter
Cultural Navigators provides immigrants a voice and an ear BY NAT LEVY Bellevue Reporter
Irina Chermeshnyuk is surrounded by six people, all speaking at the same time. Huddled around a small table in the close quarters Mini City Hall in Crossroads, they need her help. All are native Russian speakers with complex forms to fill out – medicare funding requests, utility vouchers, citizenship test information – the kind that even could perplex someone fluent in English. To many of these people, she’s not just their interpreter from Russian to English, but basic English to legalese. “Some of them need us like they need air,” Chermeshnyuk said. “Every time they get the mail, they come in because they don’t want to miss something.” Chermeshnyuk is a Cultural Navigator, a member of a program that runs out of Bellevue Mini City Hall in Crossroads and the Together Center in Redmond. It is a joint venture between Bellevue, Redmond, Kirkland and King County to help people with limited English deal with some of the more complex problems that come up in everyday life. The program has operated for more than five years and serves a variety of purposes, said Barb Tuininga, the manager at the Crossroads site.
Irina Chermeshnyuk, second from right, assists a group of native Russian speakers understand complex forms at Bellevue Mini City Hall at Crossroads Mall. Chermeshnyuk is a Cultural Navigator, there to help non-English speakers with the complex nature of day-to-day operations. NAT LEVY, Bellevue Reporter It can help the spouses of employees who moved to Bellevue to work at Microsoft or another tech company get their kids involved in schools. It’s also available for low-income residents who need help applying for a job or getting in touch with human service organizations. “It’s a connection, and it’s a way for people to feel engaged and connected rather than isolated when they come from a foreign country,” said Tuininga. The program grew out of the efforts the Eastside Refugee and Immigration Coalition had dealing with a skyrocketing foreign-born population in Bellevue. Foreign-born residents now are more than 41 percent of the city’s population,
Tuininga said. Together, Cultural Navigators speak seven languages: Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Korean, Hindi, Bengali and Urdu. In addition, there is telephone access to help in more than 100 languages. Chermeshnyuk’s Russian is in high demand at the Crossroads office. As she answers questions and helps people fill out their forms, they pause every once in awhile to compose sentences in English. Shamlova Suri, who needed to fill out Medicare forms, noted: “Without this program I don’t know what I would do.” Nat Levy: 425-453-4290; nlevy@bellevuereporter.com
Pet lynx escapes, attacks Bellevue woman in home A pet lynx escaped from its cage in a Bellevue home May 4 and attacked and severely bit a woman on her arm. According to a report on KING5.com, the incident hap-
pened at a house in the 1900 block of 160th Avenue NE. The lynx belonged to the boyfriend of the 21-year-old woman. Police and medics arrived on the scene, but the lynx still was
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loose and inside the house. They waited until the owner arrived home and caught the cat. The lynx has been taken to a vet’s office in Bothell, where it is quarantined, the KING5.com site
reported. Animal control officers say they will be investigating the case since, in most cases, it is illegal to have a wild cat in a home.
A long-running lawsuit over light-rail on the I-90 bridge is heading back to the State Supreme Court. Representatives from the Eastside Transportation Association announced Tuesday they intend to appeal a recent ruling in March by a Kittitas County Superior Court that dismissed ETA’s suit to prohibit the state from transferring the two center lanes of the bridge to Sound Transit. The suit went in front of the Supreme Court in September 2010, but justices ruled in April 2011 that they could not forbid the Washington State Department of Transportation from transferring the lanes in advance. This left open the possibility of a new case in the future. ETA representatives, including Former State Sen. Jim Horn and Bellevue developer Kemper Freeman, argue that the state does not have the authority to transfer the lanes because gas tax funding was used to pay for the bridge, the area of which can only be used for highway purposes. They argue that light-rail coming across the bridge does not represent a highway purpose. Sound Transit plans to build an extra HOV lane on both the east and west sides of the highway to make up for the loss of the center lanes. A new eastbound lane through Mercer Island was completed last month.
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