It's certainly possible to install manually. The trick is finding a binary distribution of MySQLdb that works on your server. The official build of 1.2.3rc1 is for 32 bit processors, and the servers are 64 bit. Well, Lotus is, but the others should be as well.
Should you find or build a 64 bit Linux binary, install it to ~/lib/python. If it's in .egg format, rename the extension to .zip and extract the contents. Insert the following near the top of any script that needs to import a package in ~/lib/python:
Code:
import sys, os;
homelibdir = os.path.join(os.path.expanduser('~'), 'lib', 'python')
if homelibdir not in sys.path:
sys.path.append(homelibdir)
Normally, I'd say to put the above in ~/.pythonrc.py and put "import user" into the scripts, but the import fails for me on Lotus.