A longtime housekeeping and maintenance employee at the Reading Terminal Market received a heartwarming surprise from his fellow coworkers on Friday morning.<\/p>\n
Gerald L., a Haitian refugee who has worked at the Market for more than 10 years, was surprised with tickets to the Haiti vs. Brazil FIFA World Cup match.<\/p>\n
Market officials said leadership, merchants and Elliott Lewis staff collected donations to buy Gerald two tickets to Friday night’s game at the Lincoln Financial Field, currently known as Philadelphia Stadium.<\/p>\n
In a video shared by the Market, a staff member is seen giving Gerald an envelope. <\/p>\n
Before even opening it, Gerald says “thank you,” with a big smile on his face.<\/p>\n
“You need to open it,” the staff member tells Gerald.<\/p>\n
Then, the big surprise happens.<\/p>\n
Gerald pulls out a certificate that says:<\/p>\n
“Thank you Reading Terminal Market, thanks Gerald L. for all that you do for the market and the merchants. Please enjoy Haiti and Brazil match tonight… You are going!”<\/p>\n
Staff members then start clapping and cheering, and Gerald’s smile grows even bigger.<\/p>\n
Watch the heartwarming surprise in the video above<\/p>\n
The Haiti vs. Brazil match is set to start at 8:30 p.m.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A longtime housekeeping and maintenance employee at the Reading Terminal Market received a heartwarming surprise from his fellow…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":223373,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[29464,69,71,70,9812,2236],"class_list":["post-223372","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-2026-world-cup","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-headlines","tag-philadelphia-news","tag-reading-terminal-market","tag-world-cup"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223372","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=223372"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223372\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/223373"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=223372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=223372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=223372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}