BELLEVUE -- Their apartment is so cold they can see their breath.

· See complete, ongoing coverage of the aftermath of December's storms.

They wear parkas over fleece, huddle together on a sofa draped with a colorful Mexican blanket and watch the green and red candles on their entertainment center slowly melt above a dark television screen.

Day 5 of the pre-Christmas blackout ended Tuesday for the Perez family much the way it did the other days. With no end in sight, even the children in the immigrant family have put the holidays on hold.

"The kids are not asking for Christmas. They just want the lights to come back," said Rosaura Perez, surrounded by sons Roberto, 12, and Jeshua, 2, and daughter Mirsa, 10.

The older children quietly acknowledge that they are tired of eating peanut butter and jam and miss watching "Beauty and the Geek." Roberto wants to plays games on his Xbox. Mirsa finds it too difficult to read books by candlelight.

"My children are very sad. They want to go to school -- they have a present for the teacher," Rosaura said. But Bellevue schools have been closed since Friday.

		Dan DeLong / P-I
	Rosaura Perez comforts her 2-year-old son, Jeshua, in their Bellevue apartment. The family, which immigrated six years ago, hopes to celebrate a traditional Mexican Christmas.

Rosaura is attending beauty school, and her husband, Roberto, has not found as much construction work as usual the past few weeks, starting with the snowstorm in late November. The family, which emigrated six years ago from Jalisco, Mexico, has little money saved.

"They have one paycheck for rent, another for bills and no money for emergencies like this one," said Maria Lopez, who works with Latino and other families at Jubilee REACH Center, a new community center in the Lake Hills neighborhood of Bellevue.

The family threw out food after the power failure and borrowed money from friends to get by. They cooked some meals on a camper stove on a dining table until they ran out of gas, unaware of the danger of burning propane indoors until Lopez told them Tuesday.

They had only cold water until Tuesday, when for some reason, they had no water at all.

Jeshua wakes up at night because of the cold, and other family members are coughing.

In between efforts to just get by, the family wonders what kind of Christmas they'll experience this year.

They have covered a table with an artificial Christmas tree and several Nativity scenes that normally would be lit by a string of lights.

If she has electricity, Rosaura wants to make a traditional Mexican Christmas meal of tamales and bunuelos, crispy fritters flavored with cinnamon.

Mirsa longs to hear her favorite Christmas songs in Spanish. She already has a compact disc in the stereo, ready for playing when the power returns.

"This month is when we're very homesick," Rosaura said. "I feel very sad."

Her older children use another word to describe their feelings: "Frustrated."

Lopez met the Perez family at the Jubilee REACH Center, where the older children are enrolled in before- and after-school enrichment programs, their mom is learning English as a second language and Jeshua plays with other preschoolers.

The center serves three elementary schools, including nearby Lake Hills Elementary, where students speak more than 40 languages and about 60 percent qualify for the federal free or reduced-price lunch program.

Some of the families at the center, including the Perez family, have no relatives in the area. Lopez invited the family to her Kent home, but Rosaura's husband did not want to stay with people he did not know.

"A lot of immigrant families are isolated and in a survival mode," said Mardi Taylor, programs director at the center, which is owned by First Presbyterian Church of Bellevue and designed as a partnership with several other Bellevue churches.

The center had scheduled its Christmas party for last Saturday. Everyone assumed it would have to be canceled after the power outage.

But when Taylor arrived at the center Saturday, she found that power had been restored.

Calls quickly went out to families. About 100 people showed up, including the Perez family, to eat a ham dinner, receive gifts and temporarily forget about their circumstances.

"It was a real sweet, family Christmas party," Taylor said. "Families were talking and laughing. It was meant to be."

MORE INFORMATION

For information on the Jubilee REACH Center, call Mardi Taylor at 425-746-0506 or email mardi.taylor@jubileereach.org.