Tomcat 6: Having the JSP read a file from webapp directory

Hi;

I'm running Tomcat 6 as a stand alone service on Windows XP.. I used
the Apache-Tomcat installer ( it was convenient! ).

I have a JSP application that reads in various parameters from a file
in its webapp ( context? ) directory. The webbapp directory is not
the default. I set the webapp directory via

c:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Tomcat 6.0\conf\Catalina
\localhost\myjspapp.xml

The webapp directory for "myjspapp" would be

c:\home\tomcatapps\myjspapp

This directory would contain a file called "useful_params.prop"

myjspapp would read this file ( this is how it has been working and we
are migrating it over from another servlet container software )

The problem is that myjspapp doesn't seem to finding this file
"useful_params.prop".

Is there a way without changing the code for myjspapp to get it to
find that file in c:\home\tomcatapps\myjspapp ?

.