1. Give three compelling examples of how cultural issues affect your project.

Being on the Community Engagement and Environmental Initiative team, we are currently in the very beginning stages doing research on Kazakhstan and don’t have a clear direction of what the solution to our problem will be yet.  Some things that we’ve talked about already that could be contributing to the issue of air pollution in Almaty are the heating systems, traffic and city planning.  Cultural issues will definitely impact our project no matter what solution we try to aim for.  First of all, with the excessive traffic there is clearly a culture of people driving everywhere.  If we end up concluding that the traffic issue needs to be addressed we will run into the problem that everyone is already so used to driving to get from point A to point B and it will be hard to convince people to start taking public transportation instead or finding a different mode of transportation.   Another cultural issue is the fact that in Kazakhstan their primary language is Kazakh and Russian.  Part of our project will also be to give information to the people in Kazakhstan about our findings and to educate people on next steps to fix the problems.  When trying to relay messages and information to the people about educating them on environmental issues we need to make sure that we can translate all our information affectively and so it still makes sense to them when translated.  Lastly, part of the culture of Kazakhstan has been for the government to control the media and what information comes out to the public.  If we end up presenting ideas that the government doesn’t approve of it will be hard for us to get our research out to the public and to let people know how to inform themselves to fix the problems going on with air pollution.

2. Have you experienced or observed any of these social situations at home? Describe atleast three such situations.

I have a friend at home that primarily speaks spanish to her parents whenever they talk because they don’t speak English very well.  Whenever I go over her house and talk to her parents they will talk to me in what’s called “spanglish.”  This is basically when someone combines speaking spanish and english at the same time.  I don’t speak spanish so sometimes it will be hard for me to understand my friends parents when they talk to me because they are speaking two languages without realizing it.  Another social situation I noticed growing up in my home town was that we have a decent amount of immigrants from Korea that were in my graduating class and they would all gravitate towards each other in school because their first language is Korean.  A lot of them are my good friends, but sometimes while we would hang out together they would start talking in Korean to each other and I wouldn’t be able to understand their conversations even though I was sitting right there with them and was having a conversation with them just beforehand.  Lastly, I live in a very traffic heavy area because there are a lot of shopping malls where I live.  The traffic gets so bad at times that trips that typically take 5 minutes will take 30 minutes during rush hour.  Part of what my town does to help keep traffic down is we have Blue Laws that prevent any stores except grocery stores to be open on Sundays.  This gives all the residences at least one day traffic free so the town isn’t so chaotic all the time.

3. Give three examples of cultural practices that can be leveraged to addressed community / market problems.

One of the things that we are currently researching is if people in the community of Almaty are aware of the pollution problem.  If not we can use that to our advantage by coming up with a way to educate people about what is going on and ways for them to address the problem on their own if they can.  We also know that a lot of people in Almaty drive cars which means that we may have a potential market strategy with gas stations or mechanics.  Lastly, we also know that city planning is very big in Kazakhstan.  We can use this to our advantage while trying to come up with ideas on how to solve the air pollution issue.  Things like how to improve transportation in the new cities or heating as well as other air pollution cautious solutions.