file upload problem - urgent help needed

i know this has been posted before but i still haven't figured it out. the bloke who runs the server for a 'client' of mine has set safe mode on and therefore the standard file upload scripts fail. i needed to create a 'dump' of the database in text files whihc i've done by creating a dir within the httpd dir and chaning the permissions but when i try to upload files i keep running into the problem whereby php can't write to the temp dir as it uploads the file. i get various errors from '..... safe mode in operation...' to 'user blah blah does not have permission to write to /foo/bar/tmp'. is there ANY way round this ? Steve