"Rok ee Rok," the elders repeated, "a place to live is a place to live."

Although the statement was meant to console and fortify, it was the very lack of a place to live that defined Penn State student David Gak's adolescence.

To meet him casually, Gak (junior-health policy and administration) is just another Penn State student. A Penn State pride poster hangs in his section of a supplemental dorm room. He likes to play soccer. He opens doors for girls.

What distinguishes Gak -- what is not likely to appear on another Penn State student's resume -- is that he is one of the 26,000 "Lost Boys of Sudan" forced from their homes during bombing raids in the late 1980s. He spent 12 years in refugee camps across Africa. He walked through Sudan, Ethiopia and Kenya looking for a safe place.

The two-decade-long civil war Gak witnessed, said Gerald Martone, director of emergency response for the International Rescue Committee, has displaced more than 4 million people.

"Two million have been killed -- more than those killed in Angola, Bosnia, Chechnya, Kosovo, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somalia and Rwanda combined," he said.

Gak was born in Patieng village in southern Sudan in 1981 -- he does not know the day. He lived there with 17 brothers and five sisters.

"At that time, my life was good," he said. "I had plenty of food, plenty of family members who were taking care of me, plenty of cows to herd. At that time I was happy."

Gak remembers houses made of grass and mud. He helped care for the cows and played dominoes during his free time.

Because Gak was a child, he did not notice the war that already raged through Sudan.

The majority of the Sudanese people are Islamic, but the southern part has a concentration of Christians. In 1983, the majority government, representing northern Sudan, imposed an Islamization campaign on the South. It hoped to unite the country under Shari'a, or Islamic law, and force an Islamic economic, social and political system upon a diverse country, said Sasha Bennett of Refugee Council USA.

The Christian Sudanese refused, Bennett said, and the government retaliated by attacking southern villages.

When it attacked Patieng in 1987, Gak was not with most of his family; he was away at a cattle camp.

"So I ran on my own," he said. "My parents ran on their own and we never saw each other again."

Gak, his 5-year-old brother and thousands of Sudanese boys began a 1,000-mile journey. Many would die along the way.

"I think that I was just walking; I wasn't sure what would happen to me. I wasn't sure if I would survive," he said. "The enemy attacked people. We had no water and no food. People get thirsty, you know?"

After the children arrived in Ethiopia they spent nearly two weeks waiting for food to arrive.

"Those two weeks were like two months, because we were young kids," Gak said. "There were many of us who were homesick. We never had a situation where you be on your own -- you didn't know where your mom was, or your dad."

Gak spent four years at a refugee camp there.

"I left Ethiopia because there was a civil war," he said. "So I came back to Sudan."

Gak and his brother ran, but the Gilo River blocked their way. Thousands of the boys with them drowned, were shot or were attacked by crocodiles as they tried to cross, he said.

Gak and his brother made it back to Sudan, but the war still tore through their homeland. The boys continued walking to a refugee camp in Kenya.

Gak spent eight years there, living on United Nations food supplies and taking seminary, agriculture and English classes.

"It wasn't a balanced diet," he explained. "It just maintained you a little. Not to get fat and not to die, kind of like maintaining your life."

Gak often ran out of food and had to wait, hungry, for the next two-week supply. He said it was especially hard to ration because he often sold some food to buy things he needed.

"I can take a little portion and sell it out in order to get a pen and get exercises, to get a book," he said.

Gak's fortune changed when the U.S. government brought him and the other Lost Boys here to find a permanent "place to live."

Gak remembers the first time he saw a computer, a skyscraper and snow.

"It felt like sub-zero to me," he said.