Unicode charset problems dealing with the ZmySQLDA product

Hello. I'm dealing with the ZmySQLDA product on  Zope 2.9.7 and Python 
2.4.3 versions.
I'm having problems when I retrieve data from the database because the 
data is not rendered using the unicode charset when the zope instance is 
in a vserver (with a Gentoo Linux distribution), so I get  weird 
characters like 'á' instead of the usual ones: 'á' (as they are strored 
inthe db). This is not happening on my local machine, so I guess it 
could be a bad configuration of the vserver.
Is there any possibilities to pass a parameter to the ZmySQLDSA 
connection to make it use the unicode charset?
Which differences are between the _mysql python module and the MySQLdb 
library for this purpose?
Could it be the configuation of the vserver? How can it be relationed 
with the unicode problems?
Any idea?

Thanks!!