Marvalyn Stevens, or “Marlo,” as friends call her, has spent much of her life caring for people, particularly the sick.
A native of New Orleans, Stevens worked there for years as a registered nurse, doing everything from intensive care to emergency room medicine to surgery to pediatrics. In 1988 she started her own home health agency, which she operated out of a house in the Mid-City area.
When Hurricane Katrina hit in August 2005, the storm and the flooding that followed forced her life to change.
“The hurricane bought me out,” she said, after floodwaters in her office rose to the window ledge.
Ultimately she relocated to Little Rock and has written a recollection of the experience, “Blind Faith, Can You Trust Me in a Storm? A Hurricane Katrina Survivor’s Story.”
Under the pen name Marlo Bouvier (her mother’s maiden name), Stevens recounts her story, which starts just before the hurricane hits. The book describes how she and her son Santo survive the flooding and escape by boat from her neighborhood. It ends as they arrive at the now-infamous I-10 bridge, where they lived for almost three days before a bus arrived to take flood victims out of the city.
Stevens started writing about her experience in 2006 during a class called “Telling Your Story,” part of the Lifequest program for seniors at Second Presbyterian Church in Little Rock. In the book she focuses on how her faith in God and prayer guided her through each challenge.
Stevens had lived for 30 years in a house in Gentilly, in an area between the 17th Street and London Avenue canals.
Despite the call to evacuate, she did not plan to leave for two reasons: she had never had any flooding in her area before and she knew the community would need nurses after the storm.
To help with the city’s evacuation Mayor Ray Nagin had requested churches in New Orleans close on Aug. 28, 2005, the Sunday before the storm. But Stevens had not heard the mayor’s statement. She attended Mass with about 20 other people at St. Raymond Church and went to her priest, Father John O’Halloran, to go to confession.
“I got right with God,” she said. “I felt comfortable with whatever would come.”
By 9 a.m. Monday the storm had passed, and damage was minimal. Stevens called her son Rasta and remarked that everybody evacuated for nothing. It was only after this conversation that Stevens noticed a car floating down her street on the “wall of water” the levee breaks had created.
At this point another son, Santo, came to her house. She put on a life preserver and rubber boots, they collected some supplies, and she began what became a nearly month-long journey from her neighborhood to Little Rock, with stops along the way in Houston, Port Arthur, Texas, and the I-10 bridge.
During her time on the bridge, Steven’s medical training allowed her to provide assistance when she could. When helicopters arrived, Stevens was able to get help for the people who needed it the most.
Late Thursday night a bus arrived to take the remaining people off the bridge and to the Reliant Center in Houston. It was only then that Stevens realized how many people had been affected.
From Houston, Stevens went to Port Arthur, where her daughter-in-law’s family lived. It was only two hours from New Orleans, and she planned to put her life back together there. Three weeks later, Hurricane Rita threatened the Texas coast, and she had to evacuate.
After a meal in a stranger’s home and two nights in a church in Huntsville, Texas, Stevens realized, “I couldn’t go back through Texas.” She decided to join her daughter Shay and grandchildren in Little Rock.
“I did not want to come. It was too far away to put my life back together,” she said. “I came reluctantly to this town. Little did I know there would be blessings in store.”
She compares Little Rock to the “feet of the dove,” or the Holy Spirit, because of the “love, joy, patience and kindness” she received.
Stevens is now a parishioner at Our Lady of the Holy Souls Church, where her grandchildren attend school, and goes to daily Mass at Christ the King Church, which is closer to her apartment.
“I was in a horrific state when I got here. I was hurt, angry, overwhelmed,” she said. She credits her recovery to “going to daily Mass and adoration and the cordial people in Arkansas,” including Holy Souls Stephen minister Diane Hoelzeman, whom Stevens calls her “Simon of Cyrene.”
However, Stevens returns to New Orleans regularly to visit. Both sons are back in New Orleans, and her sister moved back this month.
She has also volunteered with recovery efforts, including accompanying Holy Souls’ Catholic Youth Ministry on a mission trip. She was impressed with the desire to help shown by young people.
“Young people up working by 6:30 every morning. They got nothing but were so happy to do it,” she said. “If strangers are doing something, I have to do something.”
An encounter with a friend in a religious order led her to Contemplatives In Action, a ministry started in 2006 to provide relief to Katrina victims through “a space to rest, prayer, and a thoughtful response” to the situation, according to the group’s Web site.
Jocelyn A. Sideco, founder and executive director of the ministry, was a campus minister at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wis., before she came to New Orleans after Katrina to develop a volunteer program for the Jesuits.
“The need is still here,” Sideco said.
Through Project Marlo, a new program through Contemplatives in Action, Stevens hopes to provide lodging for volunteers and health care in her community, even in her absence. Project Marlo will allow Stevens to loan the ministry the properties she owns in the area, and the group will help her make the remaining necessary repairs through fund-raising and volunteer work. Stevens paid off the mortgages with her insurance settlements.
“I know I could sell them. But when you lose everything, you realize giving is really what makes you fulfilled,” she said.
The current plans for the properties include turning her home health agency office into a health improvement center for the community, making the former restaurant next door into a retreat cottage for locals and volunteers, converting a garage into a work space for projects, and transforming an empty lot to a peace garden.
Stevens hopes to find a publisher for the manuscript with proceeds going to fund Project Marlo.
“It was truly catastrophic,” she said. “I survived through my faith in God. But I didn’t recognize the blessings that would come. Adversity is a blessing turned inside out. God always gives more than he exacts.”
To donate to Project Marlo, send checks to Contemplatives in Action, 3014 Saint Thomas Street, New Orleans, LA 70115 or visit www.contemplativesinaction.org.
