We don’t often discuss the war, but one day last week Olesya and I spent a few minutes doing just that. She told me with some pride about the destruction of the bridge to Crimea, which I hadn’t yet heard about. Somehow tons of explosives had been planted there. And this came on the heels of daring drone attacks on Russian air force bases. Many drones were being made by Ukrainians in their homes, she said, using 3-D printers and other easily accessible materials.

Olesya lives in Lviv, which is in the west of the country, far from the heavy fighting. They get regular air raid warnings, but few actual attacks, though one attack destroyed some friends’ house and car. She says you can tell whether the sirens are serious by how they sound. If it’s not serious, she and her husband just go into the hallway of their apartment. If it’s serious, they go to an underground shelter.

But most days, life goes on in what has become the new normal in the past two and a half years. The couple, both in their 30s, are putting the finishing touches on a cottage outside the city, waiting for the furniture to be built and delivered. The furniture guy works slowly and focuses only on one thing at a time, she says, with some annoyance. So if he can’t get materials for the wardrobe he’s finishing, he just waits, doesn’t start working on the shelves they also need.

They support the troops fighting in the east with donations of money and supplies. Today she was transporting a small refrigerator to a friend who was going to find a way to send it to the front. It is getting hot now, she said, and the soldiers’ food is spoiling.

I have been meeting with Olesya on Zoom once a week for more than a year. I found her through an organization called Engin, which provides English tutors for people in Ukraine who want to learn or improve their English. It seems that learning English is an important skill aimed at a future for when there is no longer a war. I had wanted to do something when that war started, and I learned about this organization from my niece Katie, who has now tutored several people and even acquired enough Ukrainian language to be able to communicate with them.

Although Engin offers many language learning tools for prospective tutors, I have not made much use of them. Olesya’s English was already good and she mainly wanted practice in using it. She has little time for homework. So by way of teaching, I occasionally interrupt our conversations to suggest a better idiom or a synonym. Sometimes I correct her pronunciation of a word. But mostly our conversations proceed without much interruption except to look things up in dictionaries (what is the Ukrainian word for that?) or for online information (what is 80 degrees Fahrenheit in Celsius?). I send her pictures of my garden and she sends me pictures of their new place. We talk about what we have been doing, our families, our cooking, our national traditions. We go off on tangents — what kind of makeup do Ukrainian women like to use? What are American houses built with? Mostly we avoid talking about the war, a preference she made clear when we started.

Olesya manages a small IT business and sometimes travels for work. To leave the country she has to take a bus to the Polish border, wait there often for many hours, then get a train or plane for elsewhere. When I first began talking with her she told me that next week she would be in the Netherlands. Was she immigrating? I asked her. Heavens, no, she said. This was just a business trip. She would stay here with her country. She was not leaving. This was her home.

Engin is always looking for new tutors. If you are interested, contact them at enginprogram.org. They will do a short online interview and offer as much support as you need. They also offer a program for learning Ukrainian. I may take them up on it if I get the nerve.

Marietta Pritchard lives in Amherst. She can be reached at mppritchard@comcast.net.