MOSCOW: Five years ago David Tagliani was on call night and day in Seattle as Microsoft’s leading troubleshooter. He was also a physical and emotional wreck.

Now he is the happy owner of a four-computer Internet cafe that helps orphans in the small Russian town of Uglich.

As the senior manager of worldwide operations at Microsoft, Tagliani was the man the company turned to when things went wrong.

If there was a problem in Bolivia it was Tagliani who was woken up, or sent a demanding email from Bill Gates, and told to fix it. But the stress and the 48-hour days helped end his marriage, and push his family away until he finally realized that his whole life had become ‘Microsoft’. Tagliani, cashed in his million-dollar stock options and set off round the world for the next two years.

Travelling in Russia had the biggest impression on him. Six months after his return to the US, after a period teaching computer skills with inner-city Hispanic kids, he realized he could do the same in Russia and upped and left.

His mother had told him of an orphanage she had visited in Uglich, so he headed there with a couple of computers and some Microsoft software that he had picked up cheap.

He spent the summer of 1998 working with the orphans, setting up a computer lab in the rundown orphanage and picking berries and mushrooms in the nearby forests with them.

Tagliani returned to Uglich and invested $50,000 to set up the small town’s first Internet cafe next door to the orphanage. As well as being a cafe, it works as a skills training centre for orphans whether they want to learn computer skills, accountancy or how to cook pizzas for the cafe.

Until last year none of the children had stayd in school pst the age of 15 in the last 20 years. Two of the children who worked in the cafe have begun studying in a school for bookkeeping. The children are paid - 150-200 roubles ($4.50-6) a month - for working in the cafe, but have to maintain good marks in school and show what they spend the money on.

Tagliani has bigger hopes for those who go to work in the cafe. Last year he invested in a large Internet cafe in the centre of Moscow where he hopes children from the orphanage can eventually work. —Dawn/The Observer News Service.