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 could easily perplex someone fluent in English. he answers each question in rapid-fire succession. To many of these people, she is their interpreter, not just 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.

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 number one question coming to the navigators is about finding a job. It could be in the form of finding places that are hiring, or helping people prepare to start their own businesses.

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.”