DEVELOPING: 7.8 Earthquake Rocks Iran

Pakistanis evacuated from buildings in Karachi following a massive earthquake centered in neighboring Iran, April 16, 2013. / Getty Images

DEVELOPING: There are reports coming out today that Iran and Pakistan border was hit by a 7.8 magnitude earthquake Tuesday morning. Nearby countries felt this massive earthquake.

The U.S. Geological Survey says the magnitude was estimated at 7.8 and the depth at 51 miles.

The quake was centered near the border with Pakistan, in a sparsely populated region of southeast Iran.

Reports on Iran's Press TV said at least 40 people had been killed, but no official figures were given and the reports could not be immediately confirmed. Another Iranian news agency, the semi-official ISNA, quoted an official from the national emergency response agency as saying there had been no deaths in Iran due to the quake. It wasn't immediately possible to reconcile the varying reports coming from Iranian media.

A senior Pakistani official did confirm to CBS News' Farhan Bokhari, however, that five people were killed in that country as a result of the quake.

"The number of casualties could rise as reports come in from different parts of the region," added the official. Reuters reported that five people -- three women and two children -- were killed when their house collapsed in the Baluchistan region, which spans the Iran-Pakistan border.

Iran's Red Crescent said it was facing a "complicated emergency situation" in the area with villages scattered over desolate hills and valleys. Iran's semiofficial ISNA news agency and others described the quake as the strongest to hit the region in more than 50 years.

Iran is prone to quakes, and the nation's southern coast runs along the boundary of a tectonic plate. The southeastern corner of the country, near the epicenter of Tuesday's temblor, sits near the point where three separate plates meet.

Fulbright Alum Helps Islamabad Street Kids Find a Better Future

BY JENNIFER MCANDREW
Jennifer McAndrew serves at the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan.

Jawaid is a four-year-old trash picker. He wants to be a tree when he grows up.

At least, that's what he tells his teacher during an art class sponsored by the LettuceBee Kids project in Islamabad, Pakistan.

"But you are not a tree," the teacher tells him. "If you don't like where you are, you can move."

That's the idea behind the LettuceBee initiative, which helps street kids like Jawaid move beyond a life of begging and trash picking, and re-integrate back into society through art, music, and mentorship.

The brainchild of Sarah Adeel, a Fulbright alumna and graduate of Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), the idea for LettuceBee Kids came about when she was in Pakistan in 2008 conducting research for her master's thesis on child welfare in South Asia.

"I was doing a comparative analysis between orphanages and foster-care homes, and these were some of the most abysmal places you could imagine," Adeel explains. "I spent hours getting to know the children. One day, I asked them to write letters to whomever they missed the most, and most of the letters were addressed to God. When I saw them having nobody but God to write to, I knew I wanted to help these kids who, by the luck of the draw, were born on the roadsides."

After graduating from RISD in 2009, Adeel returned to her native Pakistan to launch the LettuceBee Kids non-profit organization with fellow alums Jabbar Bangash, a Global UGRAD alum who earned his degree from Carleton University, Mohsin Ali Afzal, a Fulbright alum and graduate of UC Berkeley, and Zainab Feroz Kapadia, a Fulbright alum and graduate of Columbia University. The United States invests more in the Fulbright Program in Pakistan than in any other country in the world and supports numerous other exchange programs that together have resulted in a Pakistan-U.S. Alumni Network of more than 12,000 registered members.

An estimated 1.2 million children are on the streets of Pakistan's