Nearly 20,000 books are due to be shipped to Bougainville shortly to be distributed to the three secondary school in the autonomous Papua New Guinea province.
Three Rotary clubs in Wellington pitched in to help fund the transport and pack and label more than five tonnes of material.
But the books themselves were collected by a retailer of educational books in Otago in New Zealand's South Island who had been told of the need while visiting Bougainville.
Bill Saxton says as he is involved in selling school books, he thought he could help :
"I just went around our schools as I was going around anyway and asked them if there was anything they were not using as there are so many curriculum changes in New Zealand you've got some quite good maths books that are only five or six yeas old and science as well, so that's virtually how it started and I just brought truckloads home and we packed them up and sent them up to Wellington and Wellington put stickers in them and sent them to Auckland and I think they are sitting on a wharf in Auckland waiting to go on a ship to PNG and then over to Bougainville."
Mr Saxton says his first collection of books went to primary schools.
He says the books for secondary schools include text books, reading books and class sets of journals.
