Keeping whitespace in soapUI requests

I'm trying to insert nodes with whitespace values into my SoapUI request. When I try to do so, SoapUI removes the whitespace from my value, leaving me with empty tags in my xml for the request. It looks like <tag></tag> when I want it to look like <tag>  </tag>. I turned off "strip whitespaces" and "pretty print," but still cannot get whitespace values into my elements in the soap request. Can anyone help me figure out why this is?

Thanks.