R – How to extract a value from a field of the associated item in a custom Sharepoint workflow

I'm creating a custom WSS workflow in Visual Studio 2008 and have a 'create task' activity. When creating the task I want to be able to reference some of the field values from the list item that is associated with the workflow and for the life of me I can't seem to determine how to get at the values within the fields on that item. I know that you can use:

workflowProperties.Item

to access the item itself, but if I want to retrieve the value of a field on that item that's called 'Amount Requested' how would I go about doing that? I've seen the 'GetFromattedValue(string)' method, but I don't really want the formatted value, a raw string value is really all I want.