East Timor can finally look forward to a bright new dawn after its historic election

Saturnina da Silva doesn’t have a name for her baby boy yet, born just 12 hours before Saturday’s parliamentary election in the tropical half-island nation.

Her voice faint, the 24-year-old raised an ink-covered index finger, signalling that she had voted — from her hospital bed, no less. With an understandably tired looking smile, Da Silva jokes that giving birth at this time saved her the five-hour bus trip to vote in her home village in Viqueque in the south-east of the half-island country, which is also known as Timor-Leste.

More seriously, she says that “it was important for me to vote, even today, even though I am so tired, as this is for the future of the country”.