Mona Tyndall

She retired from active missionary service and returned to Cavan in 1995, where she became involved with the Cavan Bereavement Group, for which she trained as a counselor and supervisor. She was an acknowledged contributor to Ireland's first White Paper on foreign policy, and is credited with having had an important role in influencing some elements of Ireland's then-emerging overseas development aid policy. She was one of 17 contributors from the public whose written submissions were acknowledged in the policy paper, and lodged in the National Archives of Ireland.

The remainder of her missionary life was spent in Zambia, where she worked firstly in Monze Mission Hospital, and later in Lusaka University Teaching Hospital (UTH), after a brief year in the Westminster Pastoral Institute in London. As Consultant Obstetrician/Gynaecologist at Lusaka UTH, she became a national tutor in the sympto-thermal method of family planning. Concerned with hospital overcrowding and high post-natal mortality, she strove to reduce maternal mortality by half in the 1990s, in accordance with the "Health for All" Alma Ata Declaration (1978). In this, she was strongly supported by the Government of Zambia, and attracted funding from Ireland's then-emerging Official Development Assistance.

She began her missionary life in Africa starting in Nigeria in 1949 where she ministered to the sick and particularly to young mothers. She was very active along with her fellow religious, in caring for the wounded and displaced during the Biafran War which broke out in Nigeria in 1967. Mission hospitals and feeding centers were overwhelmed by the plight of the sick and wounded civilians and soldiers, and she labored to save lives and console homeless orphans. She and others cared for the starving and the dying. Federal Nigerian troops overcame the Biafran secessionist resistance, and took possession of all the Mission stations.

She joined the Holy Rosary Sisters in Killeshandra, County Cavan, in 1940, and after religious profession on 28 August 1942, she later qualified as a medical doctor at University College Dublin. She then went to England and qualified as an obstetrician and gynaecologist.

Sister Dr. Mona Tyndall (14 April 1921 – 7 June 2000) was a medical doctor and Roman Catholic missionary in Nigeria and Zambia. She was one of the six children of businessman David P. Tyndall and his wife, Sarah Gaynor Tyndall.