Pub. 57 2016-2017 Issue 3

20 Carlos and Laurie Liriano Community Champions O n a dealership new car display avenue a few months ago, a convoy of yellow school buses loaded with middle school students pulled up in front of the showroom at Lost Pines Toyota in Bastrop. Along with those students from eight Bastrop I.S.D. schools were hundreds of books bound for a school library in Denham Springs, Louisiana. Denham Springs, outside of Baton Rouge, had just experienced a two foot rainfall that inundated 80% of the buildings in the town, including the junior high school library. Just over eleven years ago, Bastrop Toyota dealer Carlos Liriano and his wife, Laurie, had evacuated their home in NewOrleans in the wake of the dev- astating Hurricane Katrina. Ironically, their refuge from the stormwas inDen- ham Springs, home to Laurie’s brother, Scott Varnado and his wife, Lindsay, the librarian of Southside Junior High. The community welcomed the Liriano’s and they spent almost a year inDenham Springs with their son Scott attending Southside Junior High. After getting back on their feet, the Liriano’s opened a Toyota dealership in Bastrop, Texas in 2012. When crippling floods overwhelmed Denham Springs in 2016, it was pay- back time for Laurie Liriano who im- mediately began a relief drive to help those who had rescued her family over a decade before. Establishing a relief headquarters at Lost Pines Toyota for supplies and money for the Louisiana community, Laurie and Carlos also had the idea for a book drive to replace the books lost to the flood at Lindsay Varnado’s Southside Junior High library. Lindsay and husband Scott began their trek from Denham Springs to Bastrop in the family pickup to gather the books for transport back to the library. On the day that the donated books were to be delivered to the dealership, supportive members of the Bastrop community, local school officials, dealership employees and the Liriano and Varnado families anx- iously awaited the arrival of Bastrop I.S.D. Middle School students. What happened next was nothing short of overwhelming. Pouring out of the school buses were dozens of bright eyed, beautiful students, arms loaded down with hundreds of books that they had collected to help children who they didn’t know in a town that they had not heard of a week before. All they knew was that when their hometown was devastated by fire a few years before, strangers reached out to themwith sup- port and a helping hand and they were ready to be there for the young people who needed them. As the books stacked up in the show- room of Lost Pines Toyota, the line of “We’re going to need a bigger boat”