[2] Upon the outbreak of the First World War, Martin joined the Voluntary Aid Detachment, a division of the Red Cross, and helped with the nursing of wounded soldiers brought back from the front.
[2] Martin was called to serve again a month later at Hardelot, France, in a field hospital near the front lines of the Battle of the Somme.
Shortly after the end of the War, she was called up to help nursing victims of the Spanish flu, which had begun to devastate populations around the world.
By chance, Joseph Shanahan, C.S.Sp., an Irish member of the missionary Holy Ghost Fathers, had just been named Vicar Apostolic for southern Nigeria, then still a British colony.
[2] In April 1920, Roynane arranged for Martin to meet the new bishop, and she volunteered her services as a lay missionary to work in his jurisdiction.
They arrived prepared to provide medical care, only to learn that they were expected to run a school which had been staffed by French Religious Sisters until two years prior.
To give the parents and children of the school a sense of continuity, the two women were addressed as "Sisters" by the priests and treated as if they were already members of an established religious institute.
Forced to fill in as Acting Headmistress, Martin determined to confer directly with the bishop in his headquarters at Onitsha, a journey of 100 miles (160 kilometres), for which she brought along three of the oldest girls at the school.
Meeting with the bishop, Martin was advised that caution was needed in providing medical care to the people of her mission, so as not to provoke objections by other missionaries in the region.
[2] In this formal step of forming the new congregation, Martin encountered the prohibition in the new Code of Canon Law of 1917 of the Catholic Church against members of religious orders practising medicine.
She then formed a small group of women to provide the domestic service for the preparatory school run by the Benedictine monks Glenstal Abbey.
[2] Following a long period of illness in 1932, the following year Martin approached the new Apostolic Nuncio to Ireland, Archbishop Paschal Robinson, O.F.M.
He gave his support to having the congregation established in Calabar, which at that time was under a new Vicar Apostolic, James Moynagh, S.P.S., whose own sister was a member of the new community.
[2] While still negotiating to purchase a house in Ireland as a local base, complicated by the fact that they were not yet a formal congregation, the small community sailed for Nigeria at the end of 1936.