Cyclist pedals to help with Project Rwanda

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"There are two primary choices in life; to accept conditions as they exist, or accept the responsibility for changing them."

— American author and lecturer Denis Waitley

This is how the story goes: She was riding her bicycle down Gowan Road recently, thinking how her life was about to change forever. She described it as a perfect morning. Warm. No wind. Heaven.

She came upon a firetruck and ambulance, where an elderly woman, lying on a stretcher, was receiving oxygen. She wondered if the woman had any regrets, that if the time was near for her to depart this world had she accomplished all she dreamed about.

Had she lived the life she wanted?

Had she made peace with her destiny?

She rode past slowly and thought that when her time came, when she was the one staring death in the face, she would want to leave smiling.

"It could be all over tomorrow," Kimberly Coats said. "No one knows. I’m not waiting anymore."

There is a Brad Paisley song about finding oneself, about despite being so sure where you are headed you end up lost, about it being the best thing that could happen because only then can you realize what path you are meant to follow.

This morning, on the other side of the globe, in a small landlocked African country once ravaged by a genocide that claimed nearly a million lives, Coats awakes with the hope of changing those harsh conditions life has dealt others.

It is a calling defined by the simplest of forms.

A bicycle.

She departed Las Vegas on Monday and for the next four months will volunteer with Project Rwanda, which is committed to improving that country’s dreadful economic climate by using bikes as symbols of hope. She has been riding seriously for eight years now. "I am psycho about it," Coats said.

Before you understand why she walked away from a successful job as a business development manager with Sysco Foods, why she left her husband behind to travel the African countryside and help coffee farmers in parts still labeled by many as treacherous from the 1994 genocide, realize this: Kimberly Coats had it all.

She had the 7,000-square-foot home in Kansas City and the fancy cars and toys and fat bank account. She and husband Mark once owned six restaurants. She had it all, and lost it. Filed for bankruptcy. Wiped out. Nothing left.

"You know, I spent my 20s and 30s making a lot of money by working 80 hours a week and never taking a day off and telling myself that when I had made a certain amount I would retire and really do what I wanted," said Coats, who arrived in Las Vegas six years ago. "Then it was all gone one day and I asked God, ‘What’s the deal?’ I thought I had done everything right.

"And I realized that I had been thinking of it the wrong way. That I had put family and friends way down on my list of important things all those years by telling myself I was doing it so I could take care of them and send them on wonderful trips. A switch came on."

If … then … when …

If we do this, then we can do that … When we do this, then we’ll do that … These are the words that remind Coats of the heights she once scaled and the empty air such fortune created. She has for years aided children while serving as a court-appointed advocate, a position she held in the case of Brittany Bergeron, the Mesquite child stabbed and paralyzed at age 10 in an attack that saw her 3-year-old half-sister murdered.

But it was through a magazine article that Coats learned about Project Rwanda. It touched something in her. She is nearly 43 and jokes about this being her midlife crisis. It appears more midlife epiphany.

"She’s a special lady," Mark Coats said. "I wasn’t about to steer her away from something she felt so passionate about. She is committed to something on a much bigger scale, to help people as much as she can. We never had children, but she has spent years making things better for them."

There are nearly a half-million small-holder coffee producers in Rwanda and each owns an average of 200 coffee trees. It’s a system that generates between $15 million and $35 million in trade annually, an export that continues to hold its leading place in an economy devastated by the genocide.

The faster cherries arrive from a coffee field, the better the product is and the higher a price can be put on each pound. Bicycles are the central form of transportation for farmers, but in a nation where the average annual income is $350 per family, a new $220 bike is more fantasy than you winning SuperLOTTO.

Most farmers use 50-pound bikes made of wood (think of an extra-long scooter with oversized wheels) and push them for several miles at a time carrying more than 300 pounds of coffee cherries. Rwanda is said to have changed dramatically for the better since the massacre of hundreds of thousands. What hasn’t changed: The resolve built through so much misery remains powerful.

"I want families there to have a better standard of living," said Kimberly, who will work with different organizations in trying to help farmers secure long-term loans for new bikes. "I want them to see how the power of a bicycle can change their lives and help educate their children. We have to start somewhere.

"If I can come home (in September) knowing I was able to help just 100 families, that would be a great success. I want to raise awareness about how such a small amount can make an enormous difference in a country like Rwanda.

"I want to help change lives."

She wants to know that when her time comes and she thinks about those two choices in life, she will know that while for years she accepted conditions as they were, she ultimately accepted responsibility for changing them. She wants no regrets.

She wants to know that if one day another person rides by on a bike and it is she on the stretcher, a broad smile will come across her face.

"Remember," her cell phone voice message ends, "You only have one life. Live it large."

She’s not waiting anymore.

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ed Graney can be reached at 383-4618 or egraney@reviewjournal.com.