converting string into my.settings object

HI All,
I want to place the name of a settings into a Listview.  When pressing apply I want to loop through all settings in the listview and save the corrisponding values.  So for instance I have a listview with the first item as:
The first coloumn item is "John" and the second column item is OPT_GEN_SETTING1

I want to loop through the listview, assuming there are more then one item, and convert the string value to MY.SETTINGS.OPT_GEN_SETTING1

So my question is how to convert this string to a type object?