20 year-old Vladimir Melkonyan had three months of army service left. He never made it home.

Melkonyan, the youngest son in the Gyumri family, was killed on April 1 in the recent round of fighting in Artsakh.

Vladimir’s father, a volunteer who participated in the 1990s Artsakh War, died from diabetes in 1998. Svetlana, Vladimir’s mother, said her husband’s illness was a result of the war.

The Melkonyans live in a section of a two-story building in the railroad part of Gyumri. Vladimir’s older brother Samvel got out of the army last year after serving in Idjevan, in Armenia, along the border with Azerbaijan. The two brothers hadn’t seen one another in three years. After getting discharged, Samvel went abroad to find work. He wanted to make some money to welcome home Vladimir in style.

“He had been away for two months. But when he heard the news, Samvel rushed back,” said Svetlana. “We didn’t want Vladimir to go to the front but he wanted to serve in Karabakh.”

The government has allowed the family to add an adjacent unused room to the two rooms they now have. The twenty square meter space is in need of repair. So is the entire apartment. The family doesn’t have the resources to renovate the apartment.

Svetlana, 45, doesn’t work. The family gets by on the pensions received by the grandparents. The regional government allocated the family 60,000 AMD ($125) in a one-time assistance payment. The regional government has also promised to assist Samvel in taking extension courses at the Gyumri branch of the Yerevan Engineering Institute.

On April 17, the family received $500 that had been raised by the Armenian community in Belgium.

The money was transferred to the family by Mher Margaryan, a Yerevan surgeon, and Anoush Kocharyan. Margaryan says he and his colleagues will help the family if they have any medical needs.

Margaryan and Kocharyan traveled to Artsakh that same day and visited the wife and family of Lieutenant Colonel Aleksandr Arakelyan, who was killed in the fighting.

They gave the family $500 that had been raised by the Belgian-Armenian community.