by inspiring students through their performances. today s what matters. reporter: the williams cousins have been playing the strings together for seven years. all three of our moms played the piano. they thought it would be nice for us to play the violin. reporter: mira also knows the vee viola. 19-year-old is the group s cellist. whenever i start a piece, i get really excited. a new piece, i m going to have so much fun with it. i particularly love playing the violin because i feel like it s a part of me. when i m feeling a certain mood, you know, it feels the mood, too. reporter: sugar strings perform professional and yet they still find time to bring
finish for a female trainer. it is remarkable when you consider what she had to overcome to get there. here s dr. sanjay gupta with today s human factor. reporter: kathy s heart was racing during the kentucky derby. well, not her heart, but the one that she received in a transplant two years ago. she made it to her first run of the roses as the trainer for mucho macho man, but it was she, not the horse, that was the long shot in this race. it would take forever to get over my colds. any time i got sick, it seemed like i had to go to the doctors. it seemed like my system was always weak. reporter: diagnosed with cardio myopathy in 2001, she had to stop training horses for nearly six years as her condition deteriorated. tiredness. i was sick to my stomach. everything hurt. my feet hurt. my head hurt. i was miserable. i was miserable to be around. reporter: and there was no
when she was told the class wasn t available, she decided to take matters into her own hands. take a look. maria, what is the ratios of the 45? the one and one and radical two? reporter: maria wants a career that pays well and is pushing herself and her school to get it. i was like, well, why isn t anybody like challenging me? i would do a whole week s lesson and it was just like, okay, this is too simple for me. okay, like what s next? do you worry that when you go off to college you re not going to be prepared to compete? yeah. especially like with just example, english. we re learning how to capitalize and when to capitalize. that s things that my little sister should be learning. you know? it s because more than half of the 2,200 students at maria s school don t pass statewide tests in reading, math. when they come to school, they come at the fourth grade reading level and behind in math
fire to keep people in work. reporter: amid the clatter of nail guns and sewing machines, 1,400 mattresses a day roll out of the carolina mattress guild. at least on a good day. but the owners of this small company, katherine and neil, have learned how to handle bad days, too. we had to, to survive. we lost half or more of our customer base. so to survive we had to be very proactive. reporter: ten years ago, just after they d opened in the heart of carolina s furniture belt, a devastating fire struck. wiping out their inventory, their life savings which they d invested here, and leaving a huge question my god, what are we going to do? how are we going to overcome this? reporter: the answer rebuild. fast. moving into temporary space, they raced to repair. once again dropping as much money into their dream as they could scrape up. this is all highly specialized equipment. oh, absolutely. i m guessing kind of
trying to protect his home from flooding. he built his own levee. ricky davidson says it took him 36 hours to build and 12 hours to drain 2 1/2 feet of water from around his home. now to memphis, tennessee, where i-reporter bethany harrell sent in this individuvideo of t mississippi creeping closer to home on mud island. now, those trees are in a park that is sitting under all of that water. in middleton, tennessee, it s one of those you ve got to be kidding moments. danny moore s house flooded last year. he lost all his furniture. two weeks ago he was afraid his house would flood again so he put everything he owns into a storage unit. you come back and your house is still dry. you go check and the storage unit s flooded. there s nothing in the world like it. you think, my goodness, what else can go wrong? i felt secure by putting it in the storage unit. we put everything in it you could. what you see here is stuff that we didn t have room for in