RETIRED lecturer is sending £10,000 worth of engineering equipment to help students in the Solomon Islands.

Albert Wilson, 66, of Bloomfield Road, Blackwood, won a bid for around ten items of machinery from the old Coleg Gwent campus in Ebbw Vale which includes a sheet metal rolling machine and a drilling machine.

Students based at the campus have been moved to the town’s new £33.5 million Learning Zone, so Mr Wilson put in a bid to buy items at the old site.

He is currently storing the items in a workshop where he will spend the next month carrying out any repairs needed, cleaning and painting the items.

He will then ship the items to students in the Solomon Islands from Newport Docks by company City Packers.

Mr Wilson, who worked as an engineering lecturer at Coleg Gwent, Cross Keys, also worked as an advisor in countries such as Nigeria and Kiribati in the 1980s and the Solomon Islands from 1991 to 1996.

He taught students at the Solomon Islands College of Higher Education in the capital Honiara.

He said: “I found when working in these developing countries that their machinery was very old. I look upon this as my way of helping out.”