During her doctoral studies, the author, an astronomer, regularly commuted between Berlin and Mauritania from November 2005 to April 2008. At times, life felt a bit lonely: she sometimes felt like an eremitic preacher in the desert, practicing her teaching in a unique landscape under the open sky in the 3000-star hotel of the Sahara, where she was striving to prepare didactically what she had studied at home. As a "white Bedouin," she socialized within Mauritanian society and practiced her profession as a woman quite normally there. Her colleagues in this country were exclusively men—both among the Bedouins on caravans and among the scholars she met: a teacher and a geographer. Mauritanian women typically have different professions and tend to remain more sedentary rather than going on caravans.