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

His mother had told him of an orphanage she had visited in Uglich, 125 miles 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 USA, 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 per cent go into crime,’ said Tagliani. ‘For the boys that means organised crime, for girls it means prostitution.’ In 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 $ 50,000 to set up the small town’s first Internet cafe next door to the orphanage. — ONS