Religions in Armenia

Armen Hovsepian needed help. The paraplegic 26-year-old hadn’t moved from his room in his seventh-floor apartment for six months.
Bed sores pervaded his hips, back, buttocks and ankles. His mother did the best she could to turn him intermittently and clean his wounds, but without money for medical care, the weight of his own sedentary body relentlessly advanced the sores.
When Hovsepian asked his sister to flag down two Americans who were serving in his town in Armenia, the Mormon missionaries were skeptical. They assumed he was looking for a handout.
“We went over there telling ourselves we weren’t going to help him with anything,” said Malcolm Stewart, one of the elders.
But Hovsepian just wanted to hear them talk about their religion, which they ultimately did. And after witnessing the man’s humility and happiness, Stewart wanted to do everything he could to offer the help he was initially reluctant to give.
Within weeks, Stewart had sent word to his surgeon father in the United States, who in turn made arrangements to help his son help his new friend.
Today, Hovsepian is the branch president in Charentsavan and, the last Stewart heard, has a girlfriend he is planning on marrying.
Stewart, who was at first hesitant to meet with a man in need, has decided to pursue a career in medicine.
“(I realized) to go anywhere in the world and have those skills where you could better a person’s life, was really what I wanted in life,” he said.
It was fall of 2004, near the end of Stewart’s mission, when Hovsepian’s sister contacted the missionaries. It had been about a year since Hovsepian’s debilitating car accident in Russia. He had spent seven months recovering in a hospital there, but when money ran out, he moved with his mother and sister into a concrete, Soviet-era building in Charentsavan, Armenia.
The elevator in the building broke soon thereafter — not that he could sit upright to use his wheelchair, anyway. While holed up in his room, Hovsepian was given a copy of the Book of Mormon from neighbors in the unit below him — two of only three Mormons in the city.
Hovsepian’s wheelchair had been donated by humanitarian missionaries from a church he’d never attended. Written on the back of the wheelchair in Russian was: Humanitarian Services, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
“When he got the Book of Mormon, he saw on the back … that it was same type of name, but it was written in Armenian,” Stewart said. “(He thought) ‘this has got to be the same organization.’ ”
Hovsepian studied the book, then sent for the missionaries.
“He felt the Book of Mormon was true, but he also knew that the church was involved in other good things, and that’s why he wanted to meet with us initially,” Stewart said.
The missionaries taught Hovsepian, and sometimes his mother and sister. It was three weeks before he even made mention of the extent of his wounds. One day, the elders were visiting while Hovsepian’s mother was changing his dressings. Stewart took photos, and unbeknownst to Hovsepian, sent them to his father, Dr. Charles Stewart, in Utah.
“They were just enormous,” Charles Stewart said of the wounds. A plastic surgeon, he knew the lesions would require surgery.
“They were just too extensive,” he said.
So the missionary’s father boarded a plane with a medical device called a “wound vac” — a tool he said is not available in Armenia — and flew across the world.
He was met with warmth and gratitude from the Hovsepian family.
“I walked in and this sweet mother, she just kept smiling and bowing,” he said. “They couldn’t have been nicer to me.”
Charles Stewart met with a plastic surgeon at a nearby hospital who agreed to perform the surgery once Hovsepian was ready. He stayed for a few days, got to see his son in the mission field, dropped off the wound vac, then left.
Meanwhile, his son arranged to have Hovsepian transported to the hospital. It took several men to lift him from the bed and carry him on a stretcher down six flights of narrow stairs. Stewart rented a van to take Hovsepian to the hospital.
Stewart didn’t see Hovsepian’s recovery (he went home shortly after his friend’s surgery), but once the wounds healed sufficiently, Hovsepian was baptized, along with his sister and mother. Hovsepian is now able to sit in a wheelchair and use the now-working elevator to leave his home. He presides over a branch of about 80, Stewart said.
Six months after returning home from his mission, Stewart went back to the field where he served and visited Hovsepian, who “was just really happy,” and appreciative.
Stewart said he walked away from the experience wanting to help others like Hovsepian — whom he still talks to once or twice a month.
“Until the surgery, he had never been able to sit up,” Stewart said. “And now his life is totally changed.”