"I'm looking forward" to Friday's parade, among laughs, tells the Lusa agency, Mara Soki, who has lived in Rio de Janeiro for eight years because she was recognized as a refugee due to her sexual orientation and gender identity.
"I was invited and everything is going well, thank God", underlines the Angolan woman, adding that she left the African country to work in a beauty salon in Rio de Janeiro because she wanted to improve her life, "to be heard in a slightly different way".
Her safety was also a determining factor in the change, since, explains the 42-year-old woman, in Angola there is "discrimination against trans women, against black women".
"Here we also have that, but much less", she guarantees.
In Rio de Janeiro, after the party was canceled in 2021, the Sapucaí sambadrome will again, on Friday, be the stage for the parades of the main samba schools in the country, whose members, with their costumes and floats , have become one of the most representative images of Brazil.
The event, which traditionally takes place between the months of February and March, was postponed by the local authorities to April due to the pandemic.
Now, in an unprecedented partnership between the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the samba school Académicos do Salgueiro, nine times 'carioca champion', 20 refugees from Venezuela, Angola, Morocco, Syria, and the Democratic Republic of Congo parade on Friday at the sambadrome in Sapucaí, UNHCR Brazil's communications officer, Luiz Fernando Godinho, explained to Lusa.
Families, adults and adults have been rehearsing, since March, at the school with the Salgueiro community in order to be prepared for the parade, which will start at 8:00 pm local time.
About 75,000 spectators will be able to gather in the stands of the sambadrome, as long as they present the vaccination certificate against covid-19.
The purpose of the indicative promoted by the UNHCR is the integration of these refugees selected by civil society organizations that are partners of the UNHCR in Brazilian society, the UN agency detailed, adding that the Salgueiro parade has as its samba-plot this year the celebration of the "resistance of Afro-descendant communities in Rio de Janeiro".
"Our plot talks about black resistance, and we are asking for respect, appreciation and recognition to all minorities, which includes refugee people. here", said the president of the Grémio Recreativo Escola de Samba Académicos do Salgueiro, André Vaz, quoted in the UNHCR statement.
According to the UNHCR, in Brazil there are more than 62 thousand refugees of more than 50 nationalities. In addition, 150,000 applications are being analyzed by the National Committee for Refugees.
