As maternal mortality statistics show, pregnancy can be a life and death gamble, with hospitals there lacking the same standard of medical care and equipment we take for granted in Australia.

In Vanuatu, women are expected to be strong and silent as they go through the experience of birth, supported by their close relatives. When a healthy baby is born, they stay skin-to-skin with their mothers as they bond.

However, if a baby is born sick or premature, their chances of survival are vastly reduced. For a start, it is difficult to keep the baby warm and provide resuscitation. And that's what this story is about.

Vila Central Hospital is the only hospital in the capital city, Port Vila, which had a population of 44,000 in the 2009 census. The hospital is staffed by qualified doctors, surgeons, specialists, midwives and nurses but has a ramshackle appearance and is made up of a series of old, low buildings.

In June, a new section built by the Japanese government was opened, containing outpatients and emergency departments, an operating theatre and radiology unit.

I went to Vanuatu late last year with my partner, a midwifery lecturer who was undertaking clinical practice at Vila Central Hospital. (After this experience she is now on leave for a year working in Cambodia for Australian Volunteers International).

At Vila Central Hospital she was excited to see successful breech births without intervention again and it reminded her of the many breech births she had seen in the past.

After an article was published in 2000 in the distinguished medical journal, The Lancet, detailing the risks of breech birth, natural breech births stopped almost overnight in Australia and women with a breech presentation were given a caesarean section. However, the art of breech birth is a skill that is now gradually being regained in Australia.

Vila Central Hospital has about 800 births a year, the majority of which are natural births. The cultural norm is to accept natural birth and work with the pain of labour without making a sound. Consequently the Vanuatuan staff are highly experienced at natural birth and the caesarean section rate is very low, about7 per cent, especially when compared to 31.6 per cent in Australia in 2010.

The labour ward at the hospital is crowded with the relatives of the patients who bring food. Many of the women have travelled from outlying islands, some with their mother or sister. Most speak Bislama, a creole language, and one of the official languages of the nation along with French and English.

The day that changed my holiday came when my partner came back to the hotel clearly distressed.

Health professionals learn to control their emotions, to a degree. Clearly, they have to continue to function, especially when lives depend on them staying focused. But this day the staff in the maternity ward could not keep a premature baby warm and it died.

In an Australian hospital, the staff would roll in a resuscitaire and switch on its strong overhead light and possibly use the attached oxygen bottle.

Just routine – it's taken for granted that this essential resource would be on hand. But in Vila Central, the resuscitaire had been donated in the '80s and no longer worked properly.

My brief encounters with the favelas of Brazil, the villages in Cambodia and the rural poor in PNG are insignificant when compared to the experience of aid workers. On top of this, I know thousands of babies die every year around the world. Yet I found the situation in Vanuatu, on our doorstep, particularly upsetting.

Although this incident had nothing to do with me, a middle-aged hack on holiday, it prompted me to not just file the experience away but to try to make a difference.

Back in Australia, a friend pointed out only healthy babies could survive on Vanuatu's remote islands where there is no regular healthcare, referring to the phrase of the survival of the fittest. I didn't accept that.

So I contacted ACT Chief Minister Katy Gallagher, in her role as Health Minister, to ask if any resuscitaires were surplus to requirements at Canberra Hospital. Fortunately one unit in excellent condition was available for donation to Vanuatu.

As it turns out, that was the easy part of this project.

In March I heard from Raj Rajasegaran, asset co-ordinator at ACT Health, who invited me to take a look. During a lunch break, I went to the hospital and was a bit overwhelmed to be told there were two machines available.

I took an iPhone picture and emailed it the maternal child adviser in Vila, a New Zealander working in the hospital on an AusAID contract. She was as excited as I was.

Then began the drawn-out process of communicating with Vanuatu Health and convincing them I was serious. They had to be sure the equipment could be operated and serviced by their staff

The back and forth took several months and I sensed the surplus machines could be wearing out their welcome at the hospital, so I hired a contractor to transport them to my house.

Each unit is about 120 centimetres long, 70 centimetres wide and 195 centimetres high. They weigh 90 kilograms each but are on wheels as they have to roll easily when pushed around the maternity ward.

They seemed enormous in the tiny lounge of my house. Eventually, I covered the machines with plastic sheeting and hustled them into the garage. And there they sat while I wrestled with the next stage of the project – how on earth would I get them to Vanuatu?

I decided it would be best if the paperwork was in place before I looked for transportation options. I would have looked foolish if an offer came through, but the customs declarations and other paperwork wasn't in place.

Therefore, it was a red letter day when the letter of acceptance arrived from Vanuatu Health.

The Acting Director General Dr Santus Wari thanked ACT Health for the offer of the two resuscitaires. "Based on our internal discussions with specialists and biomedical engineers, we would very graciously accept the donation of the items for use within the Vila Central Hospital."

Looking for transportation options, the Vanuatu high commissioner in Canberra, Kalfau Kaloris, asked Air Vanuatu for help but the units were slightly too tall for the cargo door of a 737.

Mr Kaloris then suggested approaching the RAAF heavy-lift squadron at Amberley. Our approach was to operate in parallel – he went to his DFAT contacts and I wrote to Defence Minister David Johnston and copied the letter to Foreign Minister Julie Bishop.

Alas, the reply was the air force did not expect to have an aircraft at Vila for six months.

Red Cross could not take the machines but offered to use their import exemption for Vanuatu.

The process of testing and eliminating transportation options took us right through Canberra's long, dark winter.

Unexpectedly, Vanuatu Health then asked if I could obtain some quotes for sending the units by sea. This was indeed a welcome development.

Did that mean they would be able to pay for freight? Yes, Vanuatu Health could use some funding received from DFAT under the health sector program.

The problem was some companies were interested only in shipping an entire container of freight. And getting them to Port Botany added to the freight cost. One company quoted $4000 to take the machines from Canberra to Vila. There was no way Vanuatu Health could afford that.

So, wouldn't it be cheaper to truck the machines to Sydney and then be shipped as part of a container load?

Fr8 Logistics, based in Vanuatu, quoted $700 for the Sydney-Port Vila trip. That sounded doable and privately I was thinking I would pay the freight if necessary.

I contacted a few companies for a quote to take the machines from Canberra to Sydney. Again, I was overwhelmed by the generosity of a group who became a key player, when King & Wilson Worldwide Moving offered to pack and take the units to Sydney for free.

This was the breakthrough, along with the DFAT funding, that allowed this humanitarian project to move towards a happy ending.

When the King & Wilson truck arrived to load the machines, I have to admit feeling quite emotional. And it's not every day you have the Chief Minister and the high commissioner from Vanuatu rolling resuscitaires along your driveway.

I had no worries putting them into the care of King & Wilson – the lads were meticulous and even rehearsed their moves to lift the heavy machines onto their truck without dropping the precious and expensive cargo. They spent a long time strapping the units into the truck and assured me a similar process would occur when the machines were loaded into the shipping container.

Of course, there had to be another hiccup. At the Port Botany terminal, the shipping company said the machines should be protected by a wooden crate for the journey on the high seas and quoted $550.

So close, yet so far.

I wasn't going to let that stop the project so I volunteered to pay, if necessary, to ensure the resuscitaires reached the container vessel, Samoa Forum, in time.

Rob Dash, of King & Wilson, wholeheartedly embraced this project and made contact with another company at Botany, Nuss Removals, who donated a large wooden crate, called a lift van. Et voila, the units were packed and loaded.

I had to admit to a touch of OCD as I tracked the machines on a website and found the vessel had sailed a day early - were the resuscitaires on board? A quick call to a laconic clerk at the forwarding company in Botany confirmed they were.

They journeyed from Sydney to Brisbane and Noumea before the vessel finally dropped anchor in Port Vila a week later - duly reported on the tracking website - but heavy rain delayed the unloading.

It took several weeks for the machines to clear customs and be reassembled, and they were handed over to the hospital last Monday, November 17, by Tanya Parkin, Australian deputy high commissioner. The units are now in the maternity ward where they will help save lives, thanks to Australian taxpayers and the generosity of the people named here.

This project is just a drop in the bucket compared to the humanitarian work being done by so many charitable organisations whose volunteers work tirelessly in harsh conditions.

The sustained dedication of individuals makes the difference. For instance, a colleague, Emma Macdonald, co-founded Send Hope Not Flowers, which helps mothers in Third World countries, and Rotary's Donations in Kind, sends numerous containers filled with medical and educational equipment to nearby countries.

Twitter: rosspeakeCT