“Our plan now is… there are no plans,” said a tearful Leticia Sanchez Garcia, a year after her home was buried under lava from a volcanic eruption on the Spanish island of La Palma.

After living with friends for months, the 34-year-old was finally able to move into a government-provided prefabricated wooden house with her partner and three young children in May.

But life remains difficult for her and many others on the tiny island, which is part of the Canary Islands chain off the northwest coast of Africa.

As of Monday, it has been exactly one year to the day since Tajogaite volcano – formerly known as Cumbre Vieja for the ridge it sits on – erupted.

A year later, Sanchez and others like her face an uncertain future.

Sanchez works as a geriatric nurse, but her contract expires in December.

Her partner lost his job when the banana plantation he was working on was destroyed by the volcano. He is now employed by the local government as a street sweeper, but his contract also ends in December.

The family can stay in the three bedroom house for free for a year.

“I’m still in denial,” she admitted while sitting on the patio of her new home in Los Llanos de Aridane, the economic heart of the island of around 83,000 people.

“I still think I’ll come back one day.”

From the terrace, Garcia can see the volcano that turned her life upside down and the mountainside where her house once stood. But she avoids looking in that direction, she said.

She misses her “garden, her chickens, making plans with friends”.

The volcano rumbled for 85 days, spewing out ash and lava flows that swallowed more than 1,000 homes.

It also destroyed schools, churches and health centers, cut off highways and choked out the lush banana plantations that power the island’s economy.

So far, the government has allocated more than 500 million euros ($500 million) for temporary shelters, road repairs, ash removal and financial assistance for people who have lost their jobs.

But many locals complain that the pace of reconstruction is too slow.

Applications for public aid are complex, they say: craftsmen are often fully booked, building materials are scarce and building permits are too late.

So far, only five of the 121 prefab homes purchased by the government have been given to people made homeless by the volcano, the regional government says.

Around 250 people whose homes were destroyed still live in hotels, according to the Volcano Victims’ Platform, which works to help those who have lost their property.

Another 150 live with friends and family.

“Nobody died in the outbreak,” said the group’s president, Juan Fernando Perez Martin, a 70-year-old former high school teacher who has contracted polio.

“But some of us would rather be dead than suffer all of these strong emotions, all of these issues that we face.”

His wheelchair-adapted home was buried under more than 20 meters (65 feet) of molten rock.

Frustrated with the delays in receiving federal aid, he took out a bank loan to buy a more modest home in downtown El Paso and adapt it for his disability. He lives there with his Mexican wife.

One of the few items they were able to take with them when they fled their former home was a portrait of the Virgin of Guadalupe, which now features prominently in their kitchen.

Everything else is gone, including Martin’s prized collection of nearly 6,000 books.

“I can never make up for that,” he told AFP news agency on the terrace of his new home, where he likes to smoke cigars.

While the eruption was officially declared over on Christmas Day, the volcano will continue to release toxic gases for a long time.

Because of this, around 1,100 people in and around Puerto Naos, a resort town on the southwest coast of the island, are still unable to return to their homes.

The gas concentrations in the area are considered too dangerous. Signs with skulls at the entrance to the village warn of “risk of suffocation”.

“We are in limbo,” said Eulalia Villalba Simon, 58, who owns a restaurant and apartment in Puerto Naos, which she no longer has access to.

She now rents an apartment on the other side of the island and is surviving thanks to help from the government and charities.

“We don’t know when we can return or if we can even return because we’ve been told it could be months or years,” she said.

“We don’t know what’s going to happen.”