With few choices, the poor take risk in volcano's path

Amanda Santizo sits on the edge of a foam mattress where her elderly mother is sleeping on Tuesday afternoon.

She says her mother is trying her best to accept the family’s new reality, following the eruption of the volcano Fuego on Sunday. They lost their home, livestock, and way of life.

“We had to leave everything behind when the Army evacuated the village,” Ms. Santizo says inside the crowded, noisy refuge in a Catholic church in the city of Escuintla, about nine miles from their village. 

The volcano’s sudden eruption left an estimated 109 people dead and another 200 or more are still missing. The death toll is likely to keep rising, authorities say.