How to override RUBYLIB for soap4r on shared host?

Group,

I need to override a default Ruby library for Rails, and I’m having
some troubles. I’m trying to run a program that consumes a PayPal web
service using soap4r. Soap4r’s last point release (1.5.5) has a bug
that PayPal trips over, but there is an incremental build since then
that fixes it. I installed the incremental build on my local box and
everything works, but when I put the code on the shared server I keep
getting an error:
undefined method `add_document_operation’ for
#PayPalAPIAAInterface:0x4096b798

This indicates I need to upgrade soap4r.

If soap4r were a gem I could install it in ~/.gems or do freeze_gems,
but it’s not. I have hacked install.rb to install to ~/myruby , but I
can’t figure out how to get ruby to look there first.

I’ve tried setting RUBYLIB in the .bashrc and .profile. This works
for irb, but not for fcgi.

I have also added this line to my environment.rb and confirmed that it
adds all the directories to the beginning of $: (and that it is
spelled right)
Dir.glob("/home/fidbaadmin/myruby/**"){ |dir| $:[0,0] = dir}

However, this did not have the desired effect in irb OR fcgi OR when I
finally just added it at the beginning of the script

How can I get ruby to look at these new files first? Any hints or
clues would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Joe