ESCONDIDO - One of the "Lost Boys of Sudan" got a reception worthy of a rock star at Rincon Middle School on Wednesday.

Sudan's military forced Benjamin Ajak, then age 5, to flee his village in southern Sudan 20 years ago. After escaping lions, crocodiles and rebel guerrillas, he grew up in a desolate refugee camp in Kenya and later settled in San Diego with the assistance of the United States.

On Wednesday, students lined up to have their pictures taken with Ajak and to have him sign copies of a book he wrote with two cousins called "They Poured Fire on Us From the Sky."

Ajak had a message for Rincon's eighth-graders that they may have heard before: Value your education and the advantages you have.

However, his experience of learning the alphabet by tracing letters in the dirt gave him extra authority.

"We had no books, no pens and no blackboard," he said of his education in Kenya. "The teacher would hold up an example written on a piece of cardboard."

Students asked Ajak about his favorite sport (soccer) and leisure activity (going to the beach), his height (six feet four inches) and if he is married (not yet).

He urged them to plan ahead and avoid having families until they have acquired professional and life skills.

"Don't do what I do," he told the group of around 200. "I have a black-collar job. It's black because of my sweat."

When he first arrived in the United States, he worked at the Ralphs grocery store in Hillcrest and later drove a construction truck. He now works for Toro Irrigation and is studying to become a teacher, he said after the assembly.

He commended one student, Meg Ward, who correctly answered his question of how many countries border Sudan - 10 including Eritrea, which became independent in 1993.

A boy asked him if the situations depicted in the recent movie "Blood Diamond" were real.

"Yes. War is the same all over the world," he replied. "But our war was more about religion."

Ajak has been speaking across California in support of the book he, his cousins, Alephonsion and Benson Deng, and International Rescue Committee volunteer Judy Bernstein wrote.

At a lunch with students afterward, Ajak said he frequently sees his cousins, who live in La Mesa now. But he has been carefully planning a trip back to Africa to see his brother and stepmother, he said.

His parents were killed in the attack on his village, but his father had eight wives, he said.

Asked by a teacher how students can help, he urged them and their parents to give aid to refugees in the Darfur region of Sudan.

Ajak is one of around 26,000 Sudanese boys - now men - who were forced from their villages in southern Sudan in the late 1980s, according to the American Red Cross.

The boys fled to Ethiopia but were later forced out, with less than half of them surviving the trek to the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya in 1992. About 3,600 of them settled in the United States.

The decades-long Sudanese civil war between the northern Muslim-dominated government and rebels in the Christian and animist south wound down after a 2005 peace treaty was signed. But a separate conflict in the Darfur region of western Sudan continues.

About 2 million people died in the earlier conflict, according to the State Department.

More information is available at: www.theypouredfire.com. and news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/3496731.stm

- Contact staff writer Quinn Eastman at (760) 740-5412 or qeastman@nctimes.com.