It was just before dawn and the roosters had yet to crow when Stella, eight months pregnant, went into labour.
She was carrying her seventh child, and there were red flags early on. A month before, she had felt the baby tumbling around in her belly. But when the pain and contractions began, everything fell quiet.
“I felt something was wrong,” Stella says.
“I couldn’t feel the baby moving and there was a bad smell coming from me.
“I told my husband, ‘there’s something wrong with me, you need to take me to the hospital’.”
Stella waited for an hour in pain before she and Francis stumbled in the dark in their village in Kivori, in remote Papua New Guinea, and found a driver who would take them to the nearest health clinic, a 10km drive away in Waima.
Stella clenched her teeth in agony as the car made its way on the dirt track filled with ruts and potholes.
When they finally arrived at the small health clinic – usually attended by two healthcare workers and visited by 6,000 people from the surrounding villages – it was empty.
In a panic, Stella and Francis looked for another vehicle that would take them to the next nearest clinic, a 12km drive away in Beraina.
“I pushed and pushed and pushed for an hour at Beraina,” Stella says. “But there was no sight of the baby, so I asked them to transfer me to Port Moresby General Hospital.”
The trip to the capital, Port Moresby, was fraught with difficulties before it even started. An ambulance was available, but the driver was nowhere to be seen.
“It took 20 minutes before we left,” Stella says. “They had to walk all the way to his home to tell him to come.
“I went to the ambulance and got on and was lying down with a nurse, and just began pushing.”
Stella, drenched in sweat and tears, arrived at Port Moresby General Hospital three hours later.
A little boy wrapped in a blanket lay lifeless in her arms.
“When my baby came, the umbilical cord was around his neck three times,” Stella says.
“The nurse cut the cord off and hit the baby on the bottom, but there was no sign of life.
“The nurse took the baby, put him in my hands and said, ‘sorry, mother’.”
The little boy was Stella’s seventh and last child.
He was also her fourth baby to die.