The Holiday Episode: Happily Ever After!
This holiday season, we celebrate myriad lifelong friendships and relationships which we have helped facilitate between incarcerated individuals and their free-world pen pals. In 2024 alone, PenPals.Buzz helped generate hundreds of long-term friendships and relationships, several engagements, and at least three marriages! On this final episode of the year, we interview Patrick and Melissa Cloud, who met right here on PenPals.Buzz. Learn about their journey and discover how a nurse from South Dakota found happiness with a prison inmate in Washington state. We wish them all the best for 2025 and beyond.Later in the episode, we talk with PenPals.Buzz member Zachary (Zac) Lopez. Zac, a 24-year-old Christian incarcerated in Idaho, shares with us what Christmas is like in prison. Learn about how the holiday affects prisoners' emotions in both good and bad ways. Hear what kind of special meal awaits them in the chow hall. And learn about holidays in Zac's unit bring people together around two communal microwaves, menudo, and the occasional tamale feast.
We'd like to congratulate Patrick Cloud (a prison inmate in Washington) and Melissa Cloud, a nurse from South Dakota. They met on PenPals.Buzz, and plan to live happily ever after. They are one of our many success stories, and we were honored to have them share their love, and their story, on our podcast. We enjoyed being able to speak with both of them, on a 3-way call, which doesn't always work out quite so well (prison phone systems aren't a big fan of 3-ways). If only Patrick could have stopped that heavy breathing, right? Then it would have been a near-perfect episode!!
Zac (don't call me Zachary) Lopez was easy-going, intelligent, respectful, and it made for a great interview. It was nice to have Daisy, our PenPals.Buzz office manager, in the studio with us to chat with Zac. We learned about the foods inmates eat in prison during the Holidays, and how holidays can affect an inmate's mental health. We wish him the best of luck for his future.