You should be able to create .profile as user, no root access necessary. Specifically, it's /home/user/.profile, make sure that you didn't do e.g. 'cd /' or something before trying to edit it. Just launching xterm should land you in /home/user, as can be checked with
It should output something like

/home/user

and

drwxr-x--- <some number> user users <some date>

which means that you're in /home/user, which is owned by 'user' in the group 'users', and with write access for 'user' (yourself) (that first 'w').

As for the script execution:
It fails with 'MyDocs/scripts/script-name.sh' ?
Does it work with 'sh MyDocs/scripts/script-name.sh' ?
Does 'sh -x' instead of just 'sh' make some output?