VALPARAISO | Imagine being 12 years old in a world where "you'd show up in a town and everyone would run away from you."

That, Ishmael Beah told a standing room only audience Monday at Valparaiso University, was his experience as a forced child warrior in Sierra Leone's civil war of the 1990s.

An estimated 800 people packed the ballroom of the new Harre Union to hear Beah, author of the best-selling memoir "A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier."

Beah, who now works with Human Rights Watch and United Nations offices to prevent the use of children in warfare, did not retell the horrors of war recounted in his book. Instead, he used his hour to tell how he regained his humanity and explore how his story might help others. With humor and openness, he focused on the positives in his story and in life.

Staying alive required him to do horrible things, but now he is glad for every day.

"That's why I'm always smiling," he said.

Beah, now 28, said he wrote his book to give context to Sierra Leone, "a place that seems so far removed from your lives, but in reality it's not." Americans often seemed to pass it over as "just another African country," Beah said, but he wanted people to know he read Shakespeare in school there and danced to Run DMC and other hip-hop musicians.

Terrible things happened in Sierra Leone, but it was never a hopeless place, he said.

"I needed to put a human face to this experience," he said, despite pressure from would-be publishers for a book that simply told of war horrors.

Beah will speak again tonight at the university. Discussion events will take place around the city next month, as part of the annual community reading project Valpo Reads a Book.

In a reading from his book, Beah told of seeing a bullet-riddled van that had fled rebel troops arrive in town. A bleeding man got out of the driver's side and pulled four dead family members from the vehicle.

Since the war, Beah said, he's been back to that exact spot. The blood has washed away and "the trees are blossoming again," he said. "For me, that's a sign that anything is possible. The fact that we're alive is a blessing."