C'est biengue, c'est biengue.

"Non, c'est le six, vehngue, deux, cehntengue!"

I tried again, with some desperation, to decipher the last number.  This was the fourth time that the man repeated the phone number, and I was slowly making it out.
But what was that last number?  Okay, twenty in French is usually "vingt" (pronounced "veh(n)") and he was saying "vehngue".  So, it was apparently normal to add a hard "g" to the end of a word that usually ended with a nasal "n".  That made the last number end with "un", which is French for "one" so what was the number right before "un"?!

Suddenly, I brightened.  He was saying "cent-et-un", or 101.  They must drop the "et" between numbers here and make the "e" in "cent" sound like "eh" instead of sounding like "aw".  I repeated the number back in the Parisian French that I'm used to and at last received confirmation.

This was the scene as I continued to drive through the setup for yet another apartment tour.  Frustration on both ends scarcely seemed the ideal way to pass an initial phone call with someone who might very well end up as my landlord, but such is life.  It was another growing experience in a long line of growing experiences.

Despite what you might think, I am not fluent in French.  I am, generally, conversational.  That is, I'm generally conversational in person.  On the phone, it takes me a minute or two to turn on my "phone brain."  I was now finding that it took longer yet to switch on my "southern accent phone brain."  We were leaving the comforting abri of the French Alps and moving to the southern coast of France.  For many in the world: a dream.  For me: yet another process of adaptation and limited communication.

The strong accent in the south presents an interesting challenge.  To be blunt, I find it charming...but I don't want to adopt it.  I've worked hard to conform my accent to the Parisian one spoken by my French family and at language school and the southern one sounds, well, so rustic to my ear.  And yet, is this part of integration?  Is this part of "contextualization", that missionary buzzword that hangs like an ill omen over every missionary's decision-making process?  The southerners have a traditional hostility towards Parisians that mirrors somewhat the disconnect between, say, stereotypical New York city-ers and Midwesterners...the small town locals resent the big city hotshots that come to their area and expect to be waited on hand and foot, the latter resent the former for being stuck in backwater traditions instead of aspiring to be like the Big Apple...or the City of Lights, in this case.

So, what to do?  Do I let myself adopt this new way of speaking to show my investment in this area?  Certainly, my children will have this accent before too long, picked up from classmates that they spend 40 hours a week with and from friends spending the night at our house.  But for me, who had some French growing up, it seems fake, as if pretending to have a different connection to France than I actually do.  But does that matter?  For Americans, I would say that it's similar to moving from Nebraska or California to the deep South.  Do you adopt that twang or not?

I haven't answered this yet.  It's, ultimately, a smaller issue in the grand scheme of things.  However, it is symptomatic of the larger issue of identity on the mission field.  When Paul calls me to "become all things to all people so that by all means I might save a few" does that extend to my identity?  As a family, we are discovering what this means, and welcome your thoughts and prayers on it!  I'm sure I'll continue to explore this thought in these blogs, because I see the ramifications for it in my life, my marriage, my parenting, and my ministry every day.