conditional in member profile plugin

[squishi]

I created a custom profile field with the ID 44 and entered a string in that field for my account.
Then I wrote a simple "hello world" plugin that looks like this:

PHP Code:

echo "OUTPUT: ";
echo $bbuserinfo['field44']; 


It is run with the member_start hook.

The first echo is executed on the member profile, the other echo is not executed.
How can I fix this?
Or do I have to write a query to get the profile field in the plugin?

$post['field44'] does not work and neither does $userinfo['field44'] on that plugin.
Later, I want to write a conditional and display some variables in the templates. But I first need to know how to access the custom profile field from the member profile plugin.