Center of Attention

    If you know anything about me you know that the whole "only fish in a fish bowl" is really starting to get to me.
    Walking down the street I constantly have people staring at me. And not just children.
Grown-ass adults are staring at me. I have children and adults yell at me from all the way down the street. Things like "ferenjwa" (foreigner), "you" both in their language and mine, as well as "where are you go?" People demand to know my name without so much as a "hello, how are you." Which, by the way, is incredibly rude in Ethiopian culture. Greetings are supposed to take like 5 minutes before inquiries/business begins. There are times when all I want to do is slap the children and scold them, cuss-out the adults and scream at everybody "None of your GOD damn business." But I don't because I am a good PCV . . . I might say "nonya" under my breath but that's the extent of my verbal vent. 
    Now, calmly listening to Frank Sinatra in my own room, I can rationally explain this behavior. I live in a little town. Deneba. It is so small that I can't find Dabo Kolo, which is a delicious Ethiopian snack very similar to cereal. And I would eat it as such but I don't drink unpasteurized milk.
    Anyway, Deneba is small, so the sight of my blonde hair and bleached face is not a sight that often comes here. The people are curious about me, and since I make it a point to leave the house at least once a day so they know that I am actually a resident and not a passing NGO, they want me to say hi. Even though I tell the kids my name they don't remember, which I can't blame them because I don't remember theirs. So they haven't started yelling "Julia Julia" over and over again. Which will be just as annoying as the "you you" if not more so. But the point is, they are always in my face because I am novel and make funny Englishy noises with my mouth.
    It's not that people are rude here; the staring is not because curiosity has gotten the better of manners. Deneba, and Ethiopia in general, is not a place where mothers grab children's upper arms and sharply whisper "don't stare." Because in Ethiopia it is perfectly acceptable to be up in each other's business, even complete strangers. It is ok to demand interaction between people you barely know. Passing people in the streets without catching their eye, sitting silently on the bus and generally going about your business silently and alone is not a thing here.
    I'm not knocking my own culture with that last sentence. I personally prefer it that way because well, duh. I sometimes just need to explain to myself that my community members aren't, in fact, being rude. They're just being Ethiopian.