Not much use to people in the bush? Wires, handy for all kinds of things, snares, clothing repair, bags. Sheet metal, pots and pans, spears, arrows, fish hooks, Kerosene, great for starting fires and lamp fuel. Seats, what hut owner wouldn't be the envy of the neighburhood with a few plush chairs in his house. Seat belts, to hold your pants up. Tires, can be used as furniture and cut into durable shoes. Control cables, very strong kind of rope. Any number of toys for the kids can be fashioned from the fiddle little bits. Glass from instrument panels can be used in a similar fashion to a magnifying glass to start fires, and it's water proof. I'm sure there are lot's of other ideas out there
I heard of a 707 went of the runway in Kinshasa, cut to pieces by machette and axes and turned into pots and pans and housing accesories.
A CL-44 I believe that is what it was, last flying apparently, that went down in Congo was gone in three days, all that was left were items too large to move by a few men.
Once you've lived here a while you realise very little is thrown away, you just have to look at household waste in cities where there is a great supply of regular goods, all you find is scraps of food, and the bare scraps at that. Africans on the whole I've found to be very good and stretchign the life of things to their bitter end and then someone will turn up and find some final use that no one ever thought of.
Scrap metal is big buisness out here, so big in fact that they want to ban it. Guess some big shot in his mercedes busted his car driving into an open manhole, cover mysteriously disapeared in the night
