International Lounge’s namesake continues to help USU students
Every week 79-year-old Afton Burtenshaw Tew comes to USU’s campus to help women very much like herself. The women from all over the world, including Pakistan and China, share a commonality with the Idaho native – they all know what it is like to live in a country where they are outsiders.
Tew, the woman for whom USU’s International Lounge is named, continues her work with the international wives helping them with their English, teaching them how to make pies and bread and letting them know she knows what they are going through. Tew’s journey to becoming an international wife began in 1929 in a small town in Idaho.
Born a country girl during The Great Depression, Tew grew up on her father’s dairy farm near Idaho Falls, Idaho. She was educated in her early childhood in a two-room school house, which she walked a mile to every day. Even though there wasn’t a playground or other means of entertainment, Tew said the children used to make their own fun caring for the family’s dogs and cats as well as playing baseball together.
“My dad could have been a professional baseball player but he turned it down,” Tew said. “He had other things he wanted to do, like be with his family.”
Although she grew up in a very poor family, Tew said she never knew it because of her mother. Tew said her mother was very resourceful, making everything she and her siblings wore, even underwear out of flour sacks. Despite their financial situation, Tew and her three sisters received new dresses twice a year, at Christmas and on the fourth of July.
“My mom made everything we wore from the inside out,” Tew said. “My sister, Vonda, and I were always dressed alike.”
From her early childhood, Tew was expected to work on the farm with her siblings to help bring in money for the family. Tew said she and her siblings would weed corn, plant potatoes and thin the beets, something she said was particularly hard for her. Having problems with her knees, Tew said it was difficult for her to crawl the length of a beet row to thin them out.
“My goal was to be able to go the length of a row and back,” Tew said. “I work and eventually could go half a row, then a whole row and finally I reached my goal. You can do what you set your mind to. It is up to you the person.”
Although thinning beets was a trial for Tew, she said she loved the routine of working in the fields.
“Vonda hated working outdoors and I liked it, so we would trade,” Tew said. “I would do her outside work if she would do my inside work.”
Her mother, a city girl, would bring her children a snack every morning at 10 a.m. and then would require the children to stop work during the noon hour and rest. Tew said her mother was “very protective of her girls.” After she and her siblings finished work for the day, they would go swimming in the local canal.
By the time she reached high school, Tew said a bus would drive them the mile to school every day, unless it was snowing. When it snowed, Tew said she walked the mile to school over the snow, carrying the saxophone she played in the Ucon High School band because the bus couldn’t reach their house.
Despite her involvement in extracurricular activities, such as the band and serving as the student body president, Tew was diligent in her studies and was named valedictorian of her graduating class. In addition to school work and extracurricular activities, Tew spent most of her time with her family, growing particularly close to older brother Clyde.
With Clyde being so popular, it would have been easy to forget his younger sister, but Tew said Clyde always told her she was his girl. He would write the names of girls in the lines of his corduroys and always made sure her name was on top.
“He was my big brother,” Tew said. “If I were him, I would have been my worst enemy but he took care of me.”
Tew’s strong sense of family was not only extended to her brother, but her younger sister Vonda as well. Vonda graduated from high school two years after Tew, getting the opportunity to attend a year of college because of Tew’s generosity in footing the bill.
“We didn’t pay tuition like students do now,” Tew said. “I had a job and I was able to pay her tuition, so I did.”
After graduating high school, Tew attended BYU-Idaho, then known as Ricks College, where she was introduced to B.Orson Tew. Orson and Tew dated until he left for a LDS mission to Brazil, a year later. After serving his original two-and-a-half year mission, Orson extended his mission for another six months, something Tew said was not on her agenda.
“I was not happy about it,” Tew said. “It was time for him to come home.”
Three years after leaving Tew to serve the Lord, Orson returned home a little skittish and unsure of himself.
“I waited that whole summer for him to decide it was OK to date,” Tew said. “My dad would never speak to him. He couldn’t figure out why he was making his daughter so unhappy.”
Orson finally proposed and he and Tew were married in the Idaho Falls LDS temple in 1950. The pair moved to Rexsburg, Idaho, while her husband worked toward his degree in vocal education and psychology and played on the school’s basketball team.
“He was captain of the basketball team and a great center,” Tew said.
After Orson graduated from Ricks College, the pair moved 13 times before they finally settled in their Logan house, allowing Orson to pursue a master’s degree from BYU in 1960 and a doctorate in educational psychology in 1964.
In 1962, Orson was hired as the first-ever full-time foreign student adviser at USU, which took him to areas such as Lebanon and Egypt.
In 1965, Orson was asked to move his family to Bolivia to serve as the technical adviser to the Bolivian government in education matters, so Orson, Tew and their five children packed up and moved to the foreign country. During the family’s stay in Bolivia, Tew said the family lived like royalty and were treated very well because of their ties to the government.
“We had servants, a cook, a driver and a gardener,” Tew said. “I wish I could have brought some of those servants home with me.”
Tew didn’t speak any Spanish when she first arrived, but between her hard work and a private tutor, Tew said she was able to pick up the language. She eventually translated the LDS church’s youth program materials into Spanish.
Every year, as required by the Bolivian government, Tew said the family had to leave the high elevations they were living at and return to sea level. They family chose to spend the summers traveling to Jamaica and returning to Brazil, where Orson served his mission.
Although the children received what Tew called an “excellent education” and had many opportunities while living in Bolivia, they had to learn to go without many things as well.
“It was hard to buy material things,” Tew said. “I took Levi’s in different sizes with us for the children and one of our daughters, we just let her dress grow up. At least it was stylish then for the girls to have shorter dresses.There were some things you just couldn’t get in the country.”
In July of 1969, Orson was diagnosed with cancer during his annual medical examination required by the government. The cancer was already so far progressed, Tew said she doesn’t think even today’s technologies could have saved his life.
“We knew he wasn’t going to survive,” Tew said. “He was already terminal by the time they found the cancer.”
The doctor demanded an operation be performed as early as the next day but Orson wouldn’t agree to the surgery until after a planned formal dinner and the Sabbath. The operation was performed the next Monday. After the operation, Tew said they discovered Orson already had tumors throughout his stomach. The Bolivian government flew Orson home immediately, leaving Tew to get the affairs in order and her and her children back to America safely.
“Everything we could think of we gave to the church there,” Tew said. “I was able to make it home a week after Orson.”
Orson continued his work USU with the foreign students until his death in 1974. The day of his death, his salary stopped as well as the family’s insurance benefits, the family faced a struggle without either, Tew said.
“I have been waiting for my husband most of my life,” Tew said, reflecting on his mission and the more than 30 years since his passing. “It was a hard time, but you do what you have to do.”
Tew said although the family’s situation was tight, she “never got a cent from anybody.” The family survived the hard times by leasing land on a small dry farm they owned and running their apple orchard, never buying anything they didn’t need, she said.
Tew eventually began volunteering in the International Student Office, helping the foreign wives learn how to function and take care of their families in a different country.
“I had been a foreign wife. I knew what it was like,” Tew said.
Eventually, the university hired Tew part time to continue her work with the wives and to do “whatever else needed to be done.”
Lisa Bailey, Tew’s niece, said she feels Tew’s work ethic, personality and general love of people is part of what helped her succeed with the foreign students.
“She is genuine – what you see is what you get,” Bailey said. “She is real. It doesn’t matter who she is speaking with and what she is doing. You are important, she is delighted to see you, I have seen her be that way with total strangers.
According to information put out by USU, Tew was named the director of international studies at USU, in 1987, working with the international students until her retirement in 1999. Following her retirement, the B. Orson B. Tew International Lounge, named for her husband in 1991, was renamed the B. Orson and Afton B. Tew International Lounge in honor of the work they both did to further the interests of international students at USU.
–debrajoy.h@aggiemail.usu.edu