By Andrew Jacobs

New York Times

SAO PAULO >> The Olympic torch relay certainly endured its share of indignities this summer as it wended across this vast country on its way to Rio de Janeiro.

Government employees protesting unpaid wages sought to disrupt its progress. Pranksters tried to extinguish the flame by tossing buckets of water. In one especially embarrassing episode, a soldier shot dead a jaguar — the Rio Games’ official mascot — after it escaped its handlers during a ceremony in the Amazonian city of Manaus.

But the antipathy many Brazilians feel toward the Olympics briefly vanished when onlookers cheered Hanan Dacka, a 12-year-old Syrian refugee, as she jogged through nation’s capital, Brasília, with the Olympic flame in her hand.

“Today I don’t feel like a refugee, but like any other Brazilian girl carrying the torch,” Hanan, who moved here last year from a refugee camp in Jordan, told reporters during her leg of the relay in May.

At a time when Europe and the United States have angrily debated calls to take in greater numbers of refugees, the decision to make Hanan a torchbearer has highlighted Brazil’s little-noticed role as a haven for Syrian asylum seekers.

Brazil has admitted about 2,300 Syrian refugees, according to the National Committee for Refugees, a government agency. And with nearly 6,400 humanitarian visas issued to Syrians, the numbers are expected to rise significantly, officials say.

Unlike in the United States, where the prospect of resettling Syrian refugees has become politically polarizing, in Brazil, also a nation of immigrants, the influx has largely been welcomed.

Some 3 million Brazilians can trace their ancestry to Syrian migrants who began arriving at the start of the 20th century. It also helps that Brazil has been spared the Islamist extremist violence that has traumatized Europe and the United States.

Hanan, a bubbly, self-confident girl with a near-permanent smile, has become something of a darling of the Brazilian news media, a bright spot in an otherwise troubled national dash to prepare for the Games.

Still, her first few months in Brazil were anything but easy.

“To be honest, before I came here I didn’t know there was a country called Brazil,” Hanan said. “And even when I found out we were coming here, I assumed people would speak Arabic.”

She attended a local school, but was ostracized by classmates who could not understand why she did not speak Portuguese. After two months, she quit.

But six months later, her Portuguese now nearly fluent, she returned to class. She said that after a teacher explained that Hanan was a refugee, the other students were smitten.

“Now I have lots of Brazilian friends,” she said, her patter flecked with adolescent slang. She sings in a choir and dreams of becoming a doctor or a hairstylist — or, on this day, a newspaper reporter.

In June, just before leaving office, Justice Minister Eugene Aragon said Brazil would be open to receiving up to 100,000 Syrian refugees, in groups of 20,000 per year, although the future of that plan is uncertain.

And there has been little public opposition to a fast-track program that directs Brazilian embassies to issue humanitarian visas to Syrians. Soon after their arrival, refugees receive work permits and the national identification cards that give them access to Brazil’s health care system.

But at a time of increasing unemployment and crushing budget deficits, Brazil’s magnanimity has its limits. Visa recipients must pay their own airfare to Brazil, and the government provides little support once they arrive.

Although they are reluctant to complain, Hanan and her family have encountered a welter of hardships since arriving 18 months ago. Eleven relatives, including her parents and two siblings, share a one-bedroom apartment in Glicério, a fraying, drug-infested neighborhood in downtown São Paulo. Many of the adults sleep on the flotilla of four sofas that clots the apartment’s small living room.

Her father, Khaled Dacka, 40, who worked in a currency exchange office in Syria, spends his day tending a furnace at an auto parts factory.

Her 16-year-old brother, Mustapha, works seven days a week peddling cellphone accessories.

But her mother, Yusra, 35, said, “If we had stayed in Syria, all of us would be dead.”

The Rev. Paolo Parise, director of Migration Studies at Missão Paz, an organization that provides temporary housing for newly arrived refugees, said many Syrians encounter similar barriers when they make it to Brazil.

Though highly educated, they often struggle to find jobs that match their skills. It is also hard for them to find the financial guarantor and three months’ rent that many landlords require before signing a lease, he said.

“Once they leave the shelter, refugees cannot count on any federal program to help them find a place to live,” he said.

Many end up sharing dingy, cramped apartments with other refugees, and they rely on nonprofit organizations to help guide them through a world that bears little resemblance to the one they left behind.

Even so, Luiz Fernando Godinho, a spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, said, “All the refugees I have talked to feel extremely grateful for having left the dismal situation where they lived, and having established themselves in a peaceful country where interreligious coexistence is possible.”

Hanan was chosen to be a torchbearer after the United Nations refugee agency forwarded her name to the Olympic organizing committee.

“I hope that the world can know that we refugees are good people,” she said.

But her sunny disposition turned dark when she was asked what she missed about her former home.

“I can’t remember anything good about Syria,” she said, looking away.

Then she pulled a box from behind a tattered sofa, unwrapped the torch and grinned broadly as she waved it around while recalling her sudden turn at stardom.

“I’m never going back to Syria,” she announced. “I can see myself growing up here and becoming Brazilian.”

© 2016 The New York Times Company