Is a Trailer Too American to Share?

Harry and Brenda Greene were looking forward to having an exchange student from Germany staying in their home.

But at the last minute, they were told not to meet 15-year-old Stefan Sipemann at the airport because he would not be living with them as planned.

The reason: They live in a mobile home park.

“Trailer trash! That’s what they’re saying to me,” said Harry Greene, 40, a security guard who volunteered to share his west Georgia mobile home with a foreigner because he was told there was a need for hosts.

“This is not a bad place to live,” he said. “They have a hard time placing kids, and they are going to complain because we live in a trailer? There’s no logic there.”

Laurel O’Rourke, national counselor for the American Intercultural Student Exchange, the nonprofit foundation that set up the arrangement, said it was a matter of too wide a cultural difference.

In Europe, O’Rourke said, mobile homes are known as holiday lodgings, not permanent homes.

“Most exchange organizations have that same problem,” she said. “It’s a cultural difference.”

A double-wide trailer would have been passable, O’Rourke said.

“We do have kids placed in double wides, in apartments and on farms,” she said. “And we may have some single wides on private property. But single wides are crowded. Kids have no space and no privacy.”

The Greenes, who are childless, live in a two-bedroom home in a 28-unit trailer park just outside the Bremen city limits.

Harry Greene is angry at the way the organization handled matters. He said area volunteers called repeatedly a week ago in need of host families.

A local AISE volunteer visited Tuesday to screen the couple. They got the call Wednesday telling them not to meet the student.

“We went out and bought a bed and a new box spring,” Harry Greene said. “Then, all of a sudden, the rug is pulled from under our feet.”