Listen to Alla Fridrikh, a specialist in language acquisition in emergency contexts. She talks to Dolon Gupta about what ESP means in war-torn Ukraine: how learning material has to be continuously revised for exhausted and traumatized learners; how mindfulness techniques have to be re-imagined, in language classes, to help bring peace and calm to students whose lives had been upended; how language can mean hope, motivation, a future and a sense of normalcy.