Mon, Oct 08, 2001 page21

• Former Microsoft employee creates Russian Net cafe

  • THE OBSERVER
  • • 
    • 
    • 

  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 provincial 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, 43, a former firefighter, who was woken up, or sent a demanding e-mail 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."

  "Is there more to life than this?" thought Tagliani, and cashing in his million-dollar stock options he set off round the world for the next two years.

  Travelling in Russia made 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, 200km north of Moscow, so he headed there with a couple of computers and some Microsoft software that he had picked up cheap.

  "I just packed, got on Aeroflot ... went to the orphanage and knocked on the door," said Tagliani.

  Tagliani 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.

  He returned to the US, but the children in the orphanage kept on calling him back. He had learnt that many of them awaited an uncertain fate. Few of the vastly under-funded Russian orphanages prepare their charges for going into the outside world and every year many of the thousands of children who leave homes kill themselves, become drug abusers or fall into a life of crime.

  "Within a year some of the kids are dead and 30 percent go into crime," said Tagliani. "For the boys that means organized crime, for girls it means prostitution."

  Uglich, a small town that was known for making watches in Soviet times, can offer little but unemployment to the children.

  When Tagliani told one child he should try to do well at school, the child responded: "I'm going to be living in this dinky town for the rest of my life milking cows. What do I need to learn maths for, what do I need to learn English for? Cows don't speak English."

  After taking an intensive course in Russian in the US, Tagliani returned to Uglich and invested US$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 center for orphans whether they want to learn computer skills, accountancy or how to cook pizzas for the cafe.

  So far the cafe has done well. As well as being dubbed the coolest place in Uglich by one local paper, a number of other orphanages have asked him to set up a similar operation with their homes.

  Until last year, none of the children had stayed on in school past the age of 15 in the previous 20 years. Now, two of the children who worked in the cafe have begun studying in a school for bookkeeping.

  "No one has helped us better than him," said the director of the Children's Home, Tatyana Nazareva.

  "He really loves the kids and they really love him," said Nazareva, who said that Tagliani had also paid for one of the children to have an operation to fix her twisted spine -- an operation which, Nazareva says, has changed the girl's life.

  The children are paid -- 150 to 200 roubles (US$4.50 to US$6) a month -- for working in the cafe, but have to maintain good marks in school and show what they spend the money on. "Hopefully the statistics will be better for my kids," Tagliani said.
• Most Popular

  • 1

    Philippine banana sauce stopped at border: FDA

  • 2

    Chinese landing ships vulnerable, military expert says

  • 3

    New base in Philippines positioned close to Taiwan

  • 4

    People who clashed with police to be investigated

  • 5

    Olympic medalist Lin pulled from world championships