Rosie O'Donnell's Foundation Helps Katrina Victims

Nov 1, 2006— -- Annie Ford, 98, is a woman propelled by faith. As the winds of Hurricane Katrina raged and the water rose rapidly outside her home, she and her family waited anxiously for help. None came.

"We stayed there while hoping that someone would come by," Ford recalled. "Nobody came by, and so we started walking."

See More about Rosie O'Donnell's For All Kids Foundation Tonight on "Nightline"

Ford walked 40 blocks that day through waist-deep water.

Eight months later, on a visit to the Gulf Coast, Rosie O'Donnell was stunned to find Ford, and so many others like her, living in the sprawling and derelict trailer park known as Renaissance Village.

"In my mind, I couldn't rectify a woman 97 years old [at the time], all she had seen, all she had lived through, spending the last years of her life trying to balance herself in a trailer to use the toilet," O'Donnell said. "I couldn't do it. It broke my heart."

So O'Donnell's For All Kids Foundation helped find Ford an apartment, and it set aside millions of dollars to help the Katrina refugees of Renaissance Village move on with their lives. But liability issues and a spider's web of red tape, along with a wary Federal Emergency Management Agency, kept the money from reaching the people who needed it.

Finally, a year later, the foundation's efforts are getting through. Suddenly, Renaissance Village feels like an actual village. A space once defined by its silence is loud, alive with the sound of children playing, and vibrant with hope.

'Like a Prison Yard'

Trailer park was one way to describe Renaissance Village. Refugee camp was another. To O'Donnell, the park was something even worse.

"It looked like a prison yard," she told "Nightline's" Cynthia McFadden. "Even in prisons, they have running tracks. They have an exercise gym. Here was a fenced-in area, trailer after trailer after trailer, with people sitting, tired, vacant eyes. … It looked like an emergency trauma room for people who were emotionally dead. And it was unbearably heartbreaking to me."

Seven months ago, when "Nightline" visited Renaissance Village -- the largest refugee camp on U.S. soil -- it was a starkly haunting place: silent and desolate, its 3,000 inhabitants stripped of their possessions and idle nearly all the time. Depression was rampant. It was possible to go to Renaissance Village and never see a soul. Thousands of people remained cooped up in their trailers, watching television for days at a time, afraid to step outside. Of the 600 or so children who lived there, only about a hundred were registered for school. And for the young kids, there was nothing to do: no swings, no playground.