updating PKG_CONFIG_PATH

[Jmills817 at aol.com]

This is my first post, so my apologies if this is going somewhere it 
shouldn't. Also, I'm a new convert (almost a week now), to freebsd and 
unix-in-general, so please correct me if you know I'm barking down the wrong path.

I'm trying to install xfce4.0r4. I'm using a source tarball. The unpacking  
(my first time!) went fine. I built the first package (utils) in xfce's Build 
Order (./configure, make, make-install, make-distclean). Everything seems fine. 

I un-tar the next app (gui) (which has a dependecy on the previous app), and 
run ./configure. It stops and tells me it can't find utils in pkg-config path 
- add the dir of utils to PKG_CONFIG_PATH.

But the thing is, I used the default prefix (/usr/local) so I don't know why 
it doesn't know to look there. I checked my PKG_CONFIG_PATH (I'm using tcsh), 
but I don't seem to have that variable (at all) in my env. I tried "env -i 
PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig". It echoed the path back to me, but 
when I checked env, it wasn't there.

Also, I can't find the util package in /var/db/pkg. Do I need to update it, 
and if so, how?

I'm sure someone knows what's going on here.

Please help a poor newbie out!