I must be an idiot, please pity me!

[newbie]

Hello all. I'm getting very desperate now, so I have to ask for some help.
I'm working on a small project and have slipped into what must be
namespace hell.

I have a few controlling CGI scripts that use functions from other modules
to build parts of a page. Each function in these other modules contains
the SQL processing and HTML building code grouped by related data. The
idea being I can reuse the functions in the other scripts. All works fine,
providing each modules connects to the database as a stand alone job, or I
pass a database connection object thing to each and every function. I
suspect that both of these are wrong, due to the ugliness or nasty system
overhead of the datbase connections.

What I thought I should be able to do is:

CGI1.py:

import mod1, mod2

connect to database

create part of page using mod1.functiona 
create part of page using mod1.functionb 
create part of page using mod2.functionz

close database


But it doesn't seem to work like that. I've trawled though google and deja
for days (plus a couple of new rider books), and no one seems to hit this
problem. I must have a HUGE misunderstanding somewhere. I know mod1 and
mod2 cannot see CGI.py namespace, but there must be a way of sharing the
database connection, mustn't there?

Help or a kick up the bottom would be really appreciated here!

Sammy.